Merry Christmas letters 2.0

[zwiller]

Wait a minute!  Are you guys still parking cars in your garage?!   

[tbone321]

LOL, I just started too again. 

[jnealand]

I had to build a shed so my wife could have her car in the garage.  My van is 7 yrs old and has never spent a night in a garage.

[drlucas]

I've been debating using 30' arches over the driveway or megatree and using the front of the garage for the display. Can't park overnight on the street and the neighbours may or may not like me enough this December with the extra traffic on the street to let me park in their driveway. The arch option at least lets the wife have a slight chance at parking in the garage. My truck doesn't fit so it's an outdoor truck.

[zwiller]

Maybe rent a storage unit.  Although I never advocate renting, I can get a decent sized unit for like $40/mo and is close by.  Sure beats dropping $2k on a shed. 

While we're on the subject, consider a less is more display or scaling back  .  My "competitors" or fellow decorators hang 50k+ lights, blow ups, sleighs, Santas, you name it, and run like 48 channels and unfortunately do a very poor job of sequencing to the music.  From the get go, I decided I wanted a very tight musical show with less light hanging.  While my fellow decorators spend a month setting up and down, I take a few hours and spend most of this time on my duff with a coffee or beer sequencing.

[tbone321]

$40 a month adds up to 2K faster than you think and then I would have to transport the stuff back and forth.  My display is rather large but is going thru some changes.  I doubt that my display will ever be fully sequenced and even in full static mode, it still stops cars.  I am working on making sequencing a part of my display, not the full display.  Perhaps it's just my age starting to show, but I am more toward the traditional "old fashioned" type of display items and some of them just don't look good blinking on and off to the music.  I did rig my inflatables to control the lights seperatly from the blowers but I will be cutting back on the number of them that I will be using (for Christmas). 

[zwiller]

Just threw the storage idea out there as my yard space is at a premium and no way I can pull off a shed.  I have enough friends and family locally that I could store stuff at their place if I needed but I don't want my display to be that big. 

Touche on the traditional/mostly static display.  I tend to forget that not everyone wants TSO's stage mounted the the front of their house.     On the same note, I surmise a Merry Christmas sign odd to sequence well but would look awesome in a traditional display with some cool chase patterns/sparkle etc. 

[moodytx]

BigJim,

Hello from Huntsville, Tx (Prison City USA...) Just want to chime in on your Merry Christmas 2.0 as I JUST finished mine.

I can relay my experiences (for what they may be worth). I would pass on the Cat5. I built 8 of the HolidayCoro CandyCanes using pixels and after a couple of OH <insert explicative here> moments realized I didnt carry the signal back down the cane to pass over to the next candy cane (I still had the 3-channel DMX node project in my head). So I used CAT5 to bring the signal back. This worked GREAT.. until I started chaining them together. The first 4 were fine but then by the time I got to #8 the intensity was dim and the colors were REALLY off. There was way to much voltage drop. I ended up creating 2 injection points. First between can 3 and 4 and the other between 6 and 7 (I think thats where they are.. ). This solved the problem completely. Addtionally I used 4 conductor 18ga wire and 4 pin waterproof connectors all along the way. This really helped with the loss and resolved all the issues.

Having learned this, the Merry Christmas sign went alot better. Each letter is based on a "dot matrix" like pattern to create the letter and each dot is a 30mm pixel (replacing the old C9 idea we had been using).

I just posted in this forum a couple of links to the sign and to our web page (how to). You can look at the Candy Cane build and the Merry Christmas sign build and hopefully benefit from the time and mistakes I have already made.

Really liked your 2012 video. Thanks for sharing .. I hope this can help you create your sign update...

Bob Moody

[drlucas]

Wow Bob....two comments on your sign

1. 30mm pixels - they must be visible a mile away! Did you get them from ray special assembly?
2. The steel frame is simply top notch work. My old man is going to have a project on his hands next summer for me

[moodytx]

The pixels are from Ray (not a special order)

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A friend of mine that has a fabrication shop here in Hooterville did the fabrication for me.

Bob

[zwiller]

Yeah, sure, that's the real name of the town...   

Great job.  Nice to see someone use those pixels, they look great!  I didn't see the spacing of the modules.  If you don't mind, what were they? 

[therealbigjim]

Now that the bar is set high I have to bring the "A" game.  Cue the Deck the Halls movie music ....... The black coro arrived today so I will be retiring to the man cave to get started.....

[moodytx]

Now that the bar is set high I have to bring the "A" game.  Cue the Deck the Halls movie music ....... The black coro arrived today so I will be retiring to the man cave to get started.....

Just a repeat from the post on my MC sign.
If I can offer any assitance, please do not hesitate to ask. I would be happy to share any and everything I did with mine..

Bob

[moodytx]

Yeah, sure, that's the real name of the town...   

Great job.  Nice to see someone use those pixels, they look great!  I didn't see the spacing of the modules.  If you don't mind, what were they?

Okay.. you got me .. Hooterville... Huntsville.... Prison City USA ..
I went to the shop and laid out some extras. The modules are 4 1/2" on center...

I had to do some slice and dice to wire them up.. extend a few here and there and I added some 4 pin waterproof connectors at some key points.
Some of those points were to make it easy to mount/dismount the frames from the support legs and others were for power injection.
I have the main input (Data + Power) and then 3 additional power injection points (Data is carried through the "Y" connection i made and a fresh 12V is brought in directly from the supply)
The entire board runs on a single 12V @ 12.5 amp supply.

Bob

[chrisatpsu]

last year, i made coro canes, each using 8 of the plastic rectangles. when wired up directly using the 3 conductor cable, they worked fine.

once i used the 3 conductor connectors, each can was noticeably dimmer than the one before it. It seemed like i was getting a voltage drop from using the connectors.


That said,  YMMV