BradsXmasLights
WiFi Interactive
For my 9th year of Computerised Christmas Lights, I hearby present this year's installment!...
Computer Controlled Christmas Lights 2011
Watch on Vimeo for a HD version.
This year saw the introduction of ~25m of RGB LED 6803 Pixel strips. This technology has been the most impressive and by far most complicated upgrade to my lightshow.
With the advent of RGB, I also switched to LightShowPro this year and recycled/expanded my existing Vixen sequence from last year's display. Controller-wise, changing to LSP threw a big spanner in the works in that my original nine year old "on/off" non-dimming parallel port controller (64ch's of the Hill320 computerchristmas.com design) wasn't supported by LSP. However fortunatelyfor years (before I'd used Vixen), I was using my own sequencing & controller software, so I was able to make some relatively simple modifications to make my software recieve multicast e1.31 packets from LSP! Now LSP is none the wiser about the anicent electronics I have connected!
Now despite my own e1.31 enabled-controller software using <1% of CPU power - which has no problem running on the same PC as LSP; I was forced in to using a 2nd computer due to the simple reason that my fast 3.2Ghz "spare" computer didn't have a parallel port! Even more annoyly, the PCI Parallel Port expansion card I bought yonks ago for this exact reason didn't work with my software, since this "cheapie" board couldn't remap the traditional LPT1/2/3 memory addressing to the PCI bus. (So instead of LPT1 = 378h, it was something like DD00h - which of course is way outside the original spec.) Lesson here is if your using old parallel port controllers/software on new computers without builtin ports, you'll need a more expensive PCI Parallel Port card that does support remapping of the original memory ranges!)
Also the LED strips on the roof are upside down too - since they were EXTREMELY bright for my narrowish street. They are the Ray Wu IP68 strips, mounted upside down in the clear alsynite channelling. The plastic channels are then mounted to the roof using magnets.
All up there's a bit under 5000 lights over ~820 DMX channels. Of course the bulk of these channels went to the 259 RGB pixel nodes.
Computer Controlled Christmas Lights 2011
Watch on Vimeo for a HD version.
This year saw the introduction of ~25m of RGB LED 6803 Pixel strips. This technology has been the most impressive and by far most complicated upgrade to my lightshow.
With the advent of RGB, I also switched to LightShowPro this year and recycled/expanded my existing Vixen sequence from last year's display. Controller-wise, changing to LSP threw a big spanner in the works in that my original nine year old "on/off" non-dimming parallel port controller (64ch's of the Hill320 computerchristmas.com design) wasn't supported by LSP. However fortunatelyfor years (before I'd used Vixen), I was using my own sequencing & controller software, so I was able to make some relatively simple modifications to make my software recieve multicast e1.31 packets from LSP! Now LSP is none the wiser about the anicent electronics I have connected!
Now despite my own e1.31 enabled-controller software using <1% of CPU power - which has no problem running on the same PC as LSP; I was forced in to using a 2nd computer due to the simple reason that my fast 3.2Ghz "spare" computer didn't have a parallel port! Even more annoyly, the PCI Parallel Port expansion card I bought yonks ago for this exact reason didn't work with my software, since this "cheapie" board couldn't remap the traditional LPT1/2/3 memory addressing to the PCI bus. (So instead of LPT1 = 378h, it was something like DD00h - which of course is way outside the original spec.) Lesson here is if your using old parallel port controllers/software on new computers without builtin ports, you'll need a more expensive PCI Parallel Port card that does support remapping of the original memory ranges!)
Also the LED strips on the roof are upside down too - since they were EXTREMELY bright for my narrowish street. They are the Ray Wu IP68 strips, mounted upside down in the clear alsynite channelling. The plastic channels are then mounted to the roof using magnets.
All up there's a bit under 5000 lights over ~820 DMX channels. Of course the bulk of these channels went to the 259 RGB pixel nodes.
