Is it Christmas already?!

I’ve been working on my Christmas display already. It’s going to be pretty lame I think, but it’s still a lot of work.

I’m just getting into the automated lights/computer controlled thing, and it’s been a bit of work to get started. I started about this time last year, ordering circuit boards, electronic parts, and getting educated about what effects I can do.

I ended up going with an open source software package called VixenLights. It allows you to sync music with blinky-flashy lights, there’s a lot of devices it can drive, and I went with a really simple parallel port controller called the Grinch. The Grinch just does on/off for 64 channels, no dimming… and it runs off of a parallel port… tough to find those on computers these days. Lucky for me, and rather ironically, all my computers are old junkers so I was good to go.

Once I got the Grinch working, I decided to add in the dimming by building up a Renard Converter (Ren-c). It runs off of a serial port, but it’s a bit more complex as it involved PIC micro-controllers and some programming… I’ve done a bunch of PIC programming in the past, so I had a programmer, and new what I was getting into.

So, with the setup I have this year, I’ll be maxing out at 64 separate channels of blinky-flashy; Pretty lame by the standards some displays are running at.

I’ve just completed the 10 Mid-sized trees I was working on, each one is a 4′ tomato cage, wrapped in chicken wire, with 100 white and 100 multi coloured LEDs on separate channels. (at $20/string, that’s a fair bit of cash. Hence my display will be lame… too much $$ for year one)

Anyhoo, I’ve got my 10 Mids and I’ll be starting on the Minis soon. They will be the same chicken wire wrapped tomato cages, but half the size. 20 of them, each with 50 red and 50 green on separate channels. Should be able to do some nice effects with them. I’ve also got about 10 strings of 100 multis for the house, and some icicle lights to round out the year.

All in, it’s going to be about 5500 lights (all LED except for the icicles) and only using about 1200 watts…. 10Amps max. Since the power cost here is about $0.10/Kilowatt hour, it’s only going to cost me a bit over 10 cents / hour if I had all the lights on at one time… not too bad. But, I’ll be maxing out the 64 channels, so I will prolly only have 16 or 18 minis. Depends on how I set up the house. (Since each Mid/Mini is 2 channels, and I’ll have 30 total trees, that’s 60 of my 64 channels… I’m thinking I’ll need 8 channels for the house… so I have some decisions to make )

Below is a short vid of the hardware and my Mids… and some links to where more information is (click on the title of the video below to open it up in a new window, you’ll see the links in the comments on youtube.)