Wow – been a long long time since my last post – sorry about that!

Since then the 2011 show has come and gone (it went great!) and I’m well into getting ready for the 2012 show. By far the largest change will be the new MegaTree. It will contain 32 strings of 42 pixels (1344 pixels or 4032 channels) using the TLS3001 chips. What does all that mean? I used a pixel strip for the show last year – basically, it’s a flat strip with small (5mm x 5mm) RGB (Red/Green/Blue) LEDs spaced at 30 per 1M of strip. Each RGB LED is addressable which means I have direct control of each LED and each color. These new strings I will be using for the tree are similar except they look much like common Christmas light strings instead of a flat strip. This will present a “canvas” on which to apply different effects, text and animations onto. They will be driven with the SanDevices E681 controllers (two of them) which I just completed building. By using 16 strings of 42 pixels per controller, I can maximize the pixel count. The controllers support 680 pixels and 16 x 42 is 672 pixels – close enough! The tree will be 18-20′ tall or about twice as tall as last years. The TLS3001 chip on these pixels are a bit special as well – they support 12-bits or 4032 levels of dimming over the more common 8-bit or 256 levels. While the data being sent to them from the PC will still be 8-bit, the controller can shift the levels around so there are more steps at the lower levels and more at the higher levels (known as gamma correction). This will allow very smooth fades/ramps of the LEDs. I still need to build the framework to hold the tree strings however.

I also purchased some GE Color Effects pixels on eBay pretty cheap. These have 32 levels of dimming so they don’t ramp/fade nearly as smooth as other pixels – but they’re fairly large so I’m planning to put these on roof ridgeline somehow. They should show up pretty well. Another E681 will control those and I will still have the window strip display from last year as well. It should make for a very colorful setup!

I also got some cheap 4 watt LEDs – some in enclosures and some loose. The ones in the enclosures are very bright and I plan to put the others in PVC tubes to keep them dry. They will be pointed directly at the cars and be used as bright “blinder” lights. I’ll have about a dozen of these spread over the roof. These draw a fairly hefty amount of power so my good ‘ol Ren48LSD boards can’t be used for this directly. I have a few leftover DCSSRs as my plan A. My “plan B” consists of a new board I am working on called the DIYC RGB6. Basically it is a new 18-channel controller (DMX only) with six RGB outputs.  It uses the same high power output circuit as the DCSSRs but uses an 18F2525 PIC to drive the outputs. I’m still working on the code for this but my hope is to combine the DMX code from the Microchip site (AN1076) and add the MIBAM dimming code to it. MIBAM is a variation of “BAM” or Bit-Angle Modulation dimming that provides smoother and less CPU-intensive dimming over standard PWM code. The MIBAM (MIrrored BAM) variation gets rid of an issue where there’s a slight glitch when crossing the 127/128 dimming levels. The original code is written with a combination of PICBasic and PIC assembly while the DMX code is pure assembly. I’m trying to determine how to mix the two together but my coding skills are poor at best…

Anyway – that’s where things are – talk to you later!

Thought I would post some pictures of the show layout.

I still have some F.A.S.T. (Finally Affordable Snow Tubes) tubes to be built/installed – not sure if they will make it – maybe a couple will before the show is over!

Once again a long time since my last post! I was planning to start the Christmas show on December 1st but since I had nearly everything set up I decided to fire it up tonight. There’s a few bits and pieces not completed but nothing that will stop things from looking OK. I still need to wire up my strobes and put them out in the tree and I’d like to add a couple more sequences to the show. I currently have nine with most of them new and I think it looks pretty good as it is.

I replaced my E680 pixel controller with an E681 controller. Basically the E681 is the “deluxe” version of the E680 with rugged euro style connectors, fused outputs and on-board buffer chips. I set this outside in an enclosure with a 12v power supply to run my window frame display. It worked perfectly fine at first and then one string quit working. It’s not the string but something with the board – not sure what but I plan to debug it tomorrow since this is a big part of the display. I also have a dead string of red LEDs on the MegaTree and a dead SSR output for one of the green strings. I have spares so it’s no big deal.

Anyway – that’s about it for now – show is up and running – need to update the web page with the details. I plan to have a better IP camera so that anyone on the internet can view the show. It will have full pan, tilt and focus control – should be much better than last year’s!

I updated the Ren48LSD board (to version v3c) quite a while back but don’t think I posted about it so I thought I would start with that. The main differences from the v3b version was the replacement of the power supply section from using a linear regulator (7805 based) to a switcher type supply using the LM2575. The main driver for this was the 7805 would get very hot and was limited to 12v because of the power/heat dissipation – 24v was out of the question making them unusable for driving devices like the MightyMini. The new switcher design allowed anything from 9-24v (I tested it up to 30v) and the regulator did not overheat at all. I also cleaned up the silkscreen, enlarged some pads and changed the mounting hole pattern to fit the CG-1000 enclosure that many folks use. Since it’s release at least 100 or more of the new Ren48LSD’s have been built and is quite popular.

Renard48LSD v3c - partially completed

I knew I was planning to expand my channel count this year quite a bit and my current DMX dongles were probably going to fall short even though both together support 1024 channels. Instead of adding more dongles, which gets very cumbersome, I decided to go with DIYC member RPM’s E1.31 to DMX/Renard bridge device. This board takes in E1.31 (aka streaming ACN – or basically DMX over Ethernet) and spits out four ports of any combination of DMX or Renard protocol. In other words, using DMX, I could get 2048 channels from it and better yet, not be tied physically (USB is limited to about 6′) to the computer since it’s over Ethernet. This means I just have to run a single Cat5 cable from my home network to the bridge and have four universes (a universe is equal to 512 channels in DMX) available. I built two of these but will probably use just the one and keep the other for backup.

E131-DMX-Bridge

Another exciting piece of new hardware is DIYC member jstjohnz E1.31 Pixel bridge known as the E680. This device also takes in E1.31 as RPM’s bridge does, but outputs data to LED strips that use special intelligent chips to drive individual RGB LEDs. This means that each and every LED is controllable with millions of color combinations. There are several pixel chips available now and the E680 supports several different kinds. I will be using some strips based on the 1809 pixel chip. Each chip controls three LEDs and can be cut about every 15cm which allows you to use them in lots of different ways. I did find an issue with the E680 with these strips initially. The E680 uses the Parallax Propeller microcontroller as it’s brain. This chip uses 3.3v for its power supply and I/O – however the strip likes to have 5v logic levels. I found that I could add a simple driver setup using a 74HCT125 driver chip to convert the 3.3v levels to 5.0v levels. After doing this, the strips worked great! The strips came on 5m (about 16′) reels but as I mentioned, can be cut into smaller sections.

E680 E1.31 Pixel Bridge

I plan to use the pixels to drive a new window frame display. This will replace my existing PVC pipe frame wrapped with 5mm LEDs. While this is still quite usable, the switch to pixels allows me to get away from AC control and all the heavy extension cords. It will also free up my workhorse LOR 1602W boxes for sale to fund the new stuff. I decided to build a wooden frame to overlay my existing window frame. The 1809 pixel strips will be mounted to this frame and then I can just hang it over the window.

Window Frame for Pixels

Window Frame for pixels1809 Pixel Strip

1809 Pixel Strip

Last of all, my own new project was the Ren4Flood controller and DIYC Flood. The DIYC Flood is an LED flood that uses 60 SuperFlux LEDs grouped into 15 each of Red, Green, Blue and White. This allows a broad spectrum of colors as well as pure white which you don’t always get from RGB LEDs when all on. The flood itself is nothing really new – there are similar designs such as the Rainbow Flood (which I have) that use the same LEDs and general layout. The unique part of them is that they use SuperTex CL2 constant current drivers. This allows multiple input voltages of 12-24vdc so they can use common supplies to other LED display items without any changes to the board. Regardless of the voltage, the current stays at a constant 20mA and even compensates for temperature changes. It also allows you to mix-n-match LED colors (like say all White or all Red) and the CL2 driver takes care of everything. It does cost a bit more but I think it’s well worth it as it maximizes the output of the LEDs while keeping them safe from over current conditions and a simpler design due to no resistors.

Another part of the project is the Ren4Flood controller. This was primarily designed to drive the DIYC Flood and is meant to mount to the back of the flood. It uses a modified version of the Renard controller code (either serial or DMX) that only uses four channels of data instead of the more common eight channels. Using the same PIC as the other controllers saves costs when combined with other group buys even though other PIC micros may have been a better choice. The other interesting part of this controller is the addition of two trigger inputs. While I don’t have any code written for these yet, the idea is that external switchs can trigger particular light patterns for security reasons. So late at night, these could be left on and if someone came walking through your display at night, it could sense this and blast on all the lights to scare them off. This code probably won’t see light of day until next year but it should make the controller/flood combination very popular.

Ren4Flood flood controller (prototype)

DIYC Flood (prototype)

Anyway – that’s about it now – I hope to complete all my hardware stuff by mid-October in time for the Halloween show and give me the rest of the time to start sequencing for the Christmas show planned for December 1st!

Well, it’s been a couple months since I’ve posted. It’s with much sadness that I have to say my biggest fan for my light show, my father, passed away on May 11th. He was like a kid on Christmas waiting for me to post the videos of the show so that he could see it. He would watch them over and over and always talked about them. He will be missed greatly by one and all…

I must say I haven’t gotten a lot done since my last post but thought I’d put in an update anyway. Yesterday, I completed all the “oven” work on my LED strobes from last year. This is where I use my Black&Decker oven and my SparkFun oven controller to cook the PCBs to solder on the parts. Now I have a batch of 98 boards (they are about 1″ square) that are 75% complete. Now I need to install the PIC uController, a 1K resistor (SMD), a transistor and finally an LED. Altogether, my goal is to have 192 of these built. I have crystal plastic covers for them that I need to silicon on and I have ordered a bunch of 1/2″ shrink tubing to seal the board in from the weather. I’ll put four of these together using Cat5 cable and then tie them together to another section of Cat5 so there will be 16 (4×4) coming from one connector back to my Ren48LSD controller. With 12 ports, this will give me 192 strobes to really blow away the new MegaTree this year.

I completed the layout for the “RenFlood” and sent away for some prototype boards to try them out. I used DorkBot for the protos – they are really cheap (compared to others anyway). The only bad thing about them is that they will have a purple mask on them – which while kind of cool looking, is not what I want. The real boards will have a white mask to reflect the light more – although, since the LEDs don’t project backwards, perhaps it doesn’t matter – we’ll see. They go out tomorrow to be made hopefully.

I also built up a Ren48LSD board minus the controller section to be used as a base for my PropController DC board – or Prop48LSD. That board is also nearly completed but I want to add a set of 4-pin connectors in addition to the RJ45′s so that folks can use it to drive RGB strips. As  it is now, they will waste a channel since the RJ45′s are 4-channels and RGB only needs three.

Well – that’s about it for now!

I’ve been busy with a variety of projects over the past month or two. I purchased board/parts to build some “Color Sticks” from DIYC last year but never got around to building them. I finally got around to this and built one up to see how it would go. The sticks use very, very small SM (Surface Mount) components – some about the size of an ant! I used my trusty SparkFun oven controller and it went off without a hitch – mostly. Other than a slight solder bridge on the Atmel uController chip, which was easily fixed, was the activity LED didn’t light up. I pulled it up and installed another – but no good. I made sure I was following the orientation specified by the data sheet but decided to give up on that for now – it’s not that important anyway. I also had an issue with a couple of the display LEDs (these are 5050 RGB LEDs – or 5mmx5mm square - hence ’5050′). I used an eBay gift card I had to purchase an SMD rework station and replaced the LEDs with no damage to the board at all - great gadget to have for sure! The sticks have four pins connecting them back to the controller. Two pins are for the RS-485/DMX signal and the other two are for power where I plan to use 12vdc. The designer of the sticks (n1ist on DIYC) also developed a splitter board which takes the incoming DMX/power and splits it out to four sticks. This makes cabling things up a bit easier. The sticks can be daisy-chained as well - maybe up to three or four at most. Anyway – the stick looks great! The color mixing from the 5050 RGB LED is really nice – much better than the SuperFlux LEDs I used on my SuperStrips. I’m not really sure why that is because they are very similar but it’s quite a difference. I placed all 16 LEDs on the front of the board but it can be made into a two-sided stick as well with 8 LEDs per side.

I’ve been busy laying out a few new boards as well. The first two are a new flood light and a controller for it. The flood will have 60 SuperFlux LEDs using 15 LEDs of four colors (Red, Green, Blue and White). The flood is hardly anything new really but I like having the separate white channel for the LEDs as RGB-White tends to have a bluish tint to it. In addition, you can get some different colors by mixing the White with the other colors – like Pink for instance. The different part of the flood is that it will use Supertex CL2 constant current regulators. When using these, it doesn’t matter what the voltage is at the flood – 12-24v is fine and it doesn’t matter if flood #1 has 12v and flood #4 has 24v either – the LEDs will get the same amount of fixed current so that the colors between the floods is much more consistent. This can come into play when you have multiple floods at different distances because the voltage drop on the power cable can affect the resultant current going through the LEDs if using simple resistors instead. In this design, there are no resistors whatsoever making it very simple. The CL2′s are pretty reasonable – about 35 cents in 100 volume or so, bringing the overall cost of the flood up another $7 or so – not too bad. Folks can still use resistors if they want but I personally don’t see the point of it.

So that’s the flood – - the other part of this project is the controller for it. It will use the existing Renard Serial or DMX code as a base but will be modified to support only four channels instead of the usual eight. This will make it easier to map these in Vixen/LSP while sequencing since you won’t have to exclude the unused channels. The board will also have two inputs on them – which – as far as I know has not been done yet. The inputs will be used as triggers to the flood to turn the lights on based on the criteria coded into the controller. I envision this being used as a security mechanism – where after X minutes of inactivity from the show, the triggers would be enabled and if tripped could turn the flood on/off to ward off any intruders. Another option would be to wire a switch onto the flood so it could be used as general light source while setting up/repairing the display at night. The neat thing is that the controller is laid out to install on the back of the flood itself! You could stuff the whole thing into a larger flood enclosure (500W typically) and have a complete solution. It will take either AC or DC so if a transformer can be stuffed in the box, you would not need a separate power supply. I myself don’t really need either for my Christmas show so much but it might make for a neat option in a Halloween show where the triggers light up different parts of your graveyard or something. Anyway – the boards are mostly drawn out and we have a vendor available to supply some super bright SuperFlux LEDs for the project so it should make for a nice inexpensive flood for the DIY community.

I’ve also been laying out another board to be used with a new controller designed by DynamoBen at DIYC. The controller is really just a blank platform with I/O available and uses the Parallax Propeller uController. This is an awesome chip that provides the equivalent of eight uControllers in one chip. The new board is basically a renewed version of my Ren48LSD board I designed. Instead of relying upon six PIC 16F688 uControllers, it will use a single COG from the Propeller chip to drive it. It will still provide 48 channels of DC control and for all practical purposes could serve as a direct replacement for the Ren48LSD. The neat thing about the new board is the code behind it. It will implement individual channel light curves and a different dimming process called BAM or Bit Angle Modulation. Light curves are basically a table that takes the light level setting from the sequencer and adjusts the actual level as required to normalize all of your lights. What this means is you can have a super bright set of LEDs and a so-so set and configure the light curves so that the actual light ouput is identical. It can also help in performing fades. LEDs tend to have a non-linear light output. This means that they don’t follow a straight line output of light over the spectrum. In other words 20% is not 20% and 50% is not 50% output. With light curves you can make it perfectly linear so that 0 to 100% really means just that. This should be a really nice addition and can be used with both AC and DC lighting. Another feature is the BAM dimming instead of the more typical PWM dimming. PWM or Pulse Width Modulation is the most common method to dim lights. Basically, it turns on the light for x% of the cycle and then turns it off for the rest of the cycle. A “cycle” represents a typical dimming cycle and can vary depending on the lights used but typically is driven by the 60Hz of the AC power. This works well enough because it relies on the human’s eye response to persistence of vision or POV. You don’t really notice that the light is actually off – all you see is that it appears dimmer – the reality it isn’t – it’s either off or it’s on – nothing in-between. BAM takes this process to the next level and basically divides up the cycle into smaller bits so that the light is on/off several times within the cycle instead of the one time. This results in much smoother dimming overall. The combination of BAM and light curves for this project will really make for a dimmer almost as good as you can get.

Well – that’s about it for now – there are a few other things going on but I’ll save that for next time!

Well – it’s been a long time since I posted so I figured it was time for an update!

First, the show ran great and I had lots of people stopping by to watch it. There were usually at least 3-4 cars parked at all times. All of the hardware stayed up except for one section of my green arch and one snowflake. I got everything packed away in one day which is a record for me.

So – - what’s coming up for this year’s show? First, I plan to upgrade my Mega Tree from a 10′ 3×12-channel RGW tree to a 20′ 4×12-channel RGBW tree. I bought about 120 strings of 35-count white LEDs dirt cheap after Christmas. I plan to convert them from half-wave to full-wave and make them 70-count. Once that is done I plan to paint the plastic globes with Red, Blue and Green. It will be a lot of work but won’t cost much which is always good. If it all goes well it will be a great centerpiece of the show.

I never got around to completing all the strobes from last year so that’s another project to get done. I’ve got most of the boards completed but none of them are packaged yet. I’ve got all the parts (boards, wire and covers) – just need to put them together. There will be about 150 bright white and a mix of 50 Red/Blue/Green strobes.

Another major project are the RGB Color Sticks that I didn’t even get started on last year. They are similar to the RGB SuperStrips but have individual control of each LED (and each color of each LED). They can be configured as one-sided with 16 5050 LEDs (2 LEDs/channel) or double-sided with 8 5050 LEDs on each side of the strip. I was originally going to make them double sided and hang them from my tree in the front yard but I might change that up and make them single sided and use them as a window outline. This will replace my existing RGW 3×10 channel setup I’ve used for 2 years. It will also allow me to free up my two LOR1602W boxes I’ve been using to run them so I can sell them off.

Some other minor projects may pop up as well but that’s the major stuff. The good thing is that I have almost all the parts necessary to build everything so I won’t need to buy much of anything more. Anyway – - that’s all for now…

Well – the lights are now running for the 2010 show. Not a lot has changed from last year’s setup. Some of the changes were behind the scenes such as replacing my Renard Simple (x4)/DCSSR (x16) setup with two Renard48LSDs. This also allowed me to add a 20th (from 19) LED strip as well as adding white LEDs to all 20 strips. Another addition/replacement are the four RGB Rainbow Floods which replace the 2x Red and 2x Green standard light bulb floodlights from last year. The new RF floods produce just about as much light each but since there are four instead of two of each color and the addition of blue, it is much better. The other addition is the strobes I built. While I got materials to build over 200 of them, I only ended up building about 100 and from there only have about 20 installed so far. I just need to solder them up and weather-proof them to make the Mega-Tree truly POP!

I had to change FM Radio channels this year – apparently a new station came on-line in an already crowded radio band. I’m now on FM 92.9 instead of 89.7. It comes in crystal clear and even with a small portable radio, I could walk at least 10 car lengths up/down the street and get a good signal. That is good enough since you can’t really see the lights that well any further away. All that’s left is to get my LEDTriks panel up telling folks to tune to the new station. Once again I lagged on getting that darn thing set up so we’ll see how that goes. I have some batch files created so that the song titles will be played prior to each run but I need to configure Vixen to run those yet.  I’ll have it all going smoothly by the end of the week. I can at least say I met my 12/1 start date even if it’s not 100% right – what’s new…

Where’s the Videos? Well – they will have to wait just a bit… The reason is that I have a good size fruitless Mulberry tree that has not dropped it’s leaves yet and it blocks quite a bit of the lights depending on which angle you are looking. They are pretty dead/yellow looking so I expect them to go within a week or so. I’ll try and get at least a temporary one up before then. Might try my Incredible phone instead of the FlipHD to see if it looks any better. The phone has white balance control so it might turn out better – we’ll see!

Earlier in the summer I ordered over 200 LED strobe PCBs and parts. They came in a week or so ago – wow – are they small! The boards are roughly 1/2″x3/4″ and is mostly surface mount parts. I was planning to use my SparkFun controller and oven to build them up but it was raining (wanted to it outdoors) so I used the soldering paste and a soldering iron. I built up about 20 of them so far (got a long way to go!). I built them in two modes, the first uses a PIC10F200 controller to produce a random flash pattern when enabled. It looks pretty good and simulates a standard strobe fairly well. It’s not quite as bright but still gives the same effect. The nice thing about these is that they will last a very long time and are not subject to breakage like a regular strobe.

LED Strobe - Top Side

LED Strobe - Bottom Side

MicroChip PICKit2 with extension cable

Now I just need to figure out a way to weatherproof the strobes. I also have clear “crystal” covers that go over the LED and helps disperse the light a bit better than just a plain LED. I doubt I will get all 200+ made up so I’m shooting for 48 to use on a Ren48LSD board with one strobe per channel. The LSD can handle 3-4 of these per channel but I don’t think I’ll have that many made anyway.

I received the prototype of my new version of the Ren48LSD (v3c). The major change is with the power supply section. I switched from using a linear style 7805 regulator to using an LM2575 switching regulator. It costs a few dollars more since it requires more parts but it will handle 9-24V with no problems (overheating mainly). I ran one at full load at 30V and it worked great and the regulator barely even got warm. There will be another group buy for the boards and parts kicked off this week for the members at DIYC.

Well – that’s about it for now. I’ve finally gotten a good start on my sequencing for the Christmas show. I have 4-5 songs about 75% done – just need to put a few final touches on them. I can always add a song or two from last year as well.

First of all, let’s all remember those who lost their lives on this fateful day nine years ago…

Today I decided to get prepared a bit for Halloween. I got a new fogger off Amazon – a Chauvet Hurricane 1300. It’s a fairly inexpensive fogger yet supports continuous fogging unlike my cheap one I’ve had for years. On this one, you just set the interval and length and it runs all night (well – until the fluid runs low anyway). On the old one, you had to push the button when it finally got hot enough and then you had to wait again. Since it wasn’t automatic, it was a pain to use since you had to manually go out and press the button. The new one does it all on it’s own – awesome! After researching foggers a bit, I saw that lots of folks use fog chillers. Basically, a fogger works by superheating the fluid and it gets pumped out and atomized with the outside air. When it leaves the fogger, it’s pretty warm and basically dissipates pretty quickly. This is not how real fog looks or works. I built my chiller based on many I’ve seen on the web. I took a plastic bin, cut a 4″ hole at each end and ran dryer vent hose through it. When you go to use it, you dump a bunch of ice into the bin and run the fogger into one end and out comes the nice and cool fog at the other end. This makes the fog stick low to the ground and it looks much more realistic. To get the fog covering the yard, I got two 10′ sections of irrigation tubing which has holes all throughout the length. The fog just dumps out the entire length (20′ in my case) of the hose and spreads evenly out to the yard. It should make for a very spoookkkyy cemetery look.

I’ll be trying out the chiller tomorrow evening – can’t wait!

I’m also back to working on the MightyMini Floods. I gave up on converting them over to constant current because I decided to convert them to 12v usage instead of 24v. If I were to stay with constant current and 12v, it would require 16 separate constant current drivers which would make them expensive to make - and lots of extra “stuff” to plug into an enclosure. So – I got out my dremel and cut the LED paths in the middle – there are two paths of each color (RGBW) or 8 paths normally so this makes 16 paths. I used 27 ohm and 47 ohm resistors. It makes for a pretty ugly end result but no one will see it once it’s in the enclosures anyway! Anyway – I got one board completed and they look great but they do generate a lot of heat. I’m not sure if there’s any way to vent these but yet keep them weathertight – we’ll see.

I’m having a DIYC member make up a wireframe pumpkin. It will be fairly large – about 4′x4′ or so and will be set up with rope lighting on separate channels. When it’s set up right and animated, you can make it vocalize words and make it “sing” a song. I’m thinking of using “This is Halloween” from The Nightmare Before Christmas. I’ll add in some smaller pumpkins and a couple skeleton heads for the chorus. If you search around on YouTube there are a few examples of it already – it should be pretty fun!

Finally, I got the new version of my Ren48LSD board laid out in DipTrace. I’m getting one or two boards made up to test and if all is good, I’ll offer more up this month. There’s already been quite a few folks asking for more boards which is pretty cool.

That’s about it for now!