Help making many snowflakes random twinkle AND/OR full on.

[liquidxmas]

One new thing I want to do this year is cover my roof with large snowflake lights. I want to use two circuits, one to turn them all on and one to make them all random twinkle. The twinkling needs to start quick.

I'm sure there is something out there that will do this. Anyone have a suggestion?

The only way I can think of doing this myself is to convert to DC with a bridge rectifier then use 3 wires to each light. Ground, full on, and twinkle. Each light would need it's own twinkle circuit and diode to isolate each snowflake light.

[trekster]

Just use a Lynx controller and the Vixen software.  You can easily program the lights to stay on or random plus many other options offered by the controller and the free software like ramp up or down, shimmer, twinkle and more.


Ron

[austindave]

Just use a Lynx controller and the Vixen software.  You can easily program the lights to stay on or random plus many other options offered by the controller and the free software like ramp up or down, shimmer, twinkle and more.

Ron

Note with this solution, at least as discussed - with 2 circuits - the snowflakes won't randomly twinkle, but will flash together (pretty much). While you have control over the duration of the flashes, they'll all go together.

I can think of a couple of ways to have it look better, but they become more complex. First, you could use two or more separate strings of lights per snowflake (and maybe share strings between flakes, if they're close enough together or you're willing to cut & extend the light strings). Each string would be connected to a different channel on the controller. This way, you could flash each of the strings separately, making it so all the lights on a flake don't turn on & off at the same time. The more strings / channels used per flake, the better. And if you were going to extend strings to cover more than one flake per string, it'd be better to separate the flakes on the shared channels by one or more flakes, so adjacent flakes weren't flashing together (I hope that makes sense... I'm trying to say that if any lights in adjacent flakes flash at the same time, it will probably be evident that they're flashing together & might damage the effect). Maybe that would be enough.

Another idea would be to use two strings per flake - one always on and one random flashing (with its own in-line controller - you know, those multi-function light strings; but one with a knob to select the function... Those "soft-select" ones tend to lose track of what mode you've set them for). You could use two controller channels - both set for "off" & "on" (rather than "dim"). When the random flashers were set to "on", they'd begin random flash immediately (again, make sure you only set values of 0 or 100% - not a "dim" setting - for these).

I'm sure others will have more (& better) ideas.

Hope this helps.

--Dave

[hbomb341]

Throw in one of those $6 DMX controllers and then you could control each one seperately.

This is my plan.

Harrison

[jnealand]

I have 14 large snowflakes on my roof with each plugged into a separate channel. i.e. 14 channels in all.  I highlight all the rows of snowflakes for the duration I want and select random.  Works great.

Just use a Lynx controller and the Vixen software.  You can easily program the lights to stay on or random plus many other options offered by the controller and the free software like ramp up or down, shimmer, twinkle and more.

Ron

Note with this solution, at least as discussed - with 2 circuits - the snowflakes won't randomly twinkle, but will flash together (pretty much). While you have control over the duration of the flashes, they'll all go together.


--Dave

[Dennis Cherry]

Look at my videos and I have 24 snowflake on the roof.

Use only 8 channels, three snowflakes on each channel.

[ratroder]

i used three channels last year and had 9 rows of snowflakes (16 in each row (2 sets of ). they were wired in sequence of 1,2,3,1,2,3,1,2,3. it worked out pretty well this year i have gone with each row having it's each own channel.

[spider236]

where do you get $6 dmx controllers?

[PJNMCT]

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-Paul