What element(s) are you building or installing this week? - 2022

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ryanschristmaslights

ryanschristmaslights

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October, we meet again. For several Australian states this weekend is a long weekend, the start of daylight savings, or both. Have you started building or putting any props outside for your display this year? Do you have all the lights and other gear you'll need or are some/all of them still in transit?

This thread can be a place to share what you're building, assembling, adding or changing in your 2022 displays. You might like to share a photo, write about it or do both, the choice is yours! PS we have a 'prop construction' media category set up for anyone that would like to share photos. 🙂


This weekend I have been pixel pushing into some green mini trees from Extreme Lighting Displays. The pixels are 12V GS8208 bullets, with separate strings for the base and star portions. My plan is for four mini trees spread out over the garden bed in the middle of my front yard. With large shrubs behind I have used just enough pixels for a 180 tree. Here's a preview of two out of the four planned:

Small green mini trees with pixels pushed (180 degree)

Small green mini trees with pixels pushed (180 degree)

35 pixels on the base (5 strands and 7 pixels per strand), 20 pixels for the star, 55 pixels in...

What I actually want to do is raise them up a bit as where I intend on placing these mini trees will be behind some ground cover. I haven't settled on how I'll do that just yet ;).

Next week I should receive the last of the lights I'll need for another prop - they're currently sitting at the courier's Adelaide depot.
 
This weekend, I put up the arches, I have held off putting up anything that will hang or could be damaged with weight put on, as they have forecast snow for us mid week, bit of an odd one for October here in NZ, but it is what it is, next weekend will be the Firework and I will probably put out the Mega tree bases and start hanging a few string lights up. I already have put up the framework over the driveway and hung the festoon lighting and icicles all over, including the Car port.

I hopefully will get the last few bits in the mail to make my wireless WLED based DMX controllers and use those to test the RGB floodlights I bought from @ShellNZ earlier this year.

I also have a power distribution box to build, but that can wait for a rainy day, 20 double power sockets should be enough, right?

Sadly nothing new is being added to the display pixel-wise as the new kitchen installed this year took all the blinky money out of my wallet, so that is planned for next year 🤞
 
Loads of things this weekend
* finished off my diff receiver boxes
* completed the DC convertors
* tested the mounting idea & brackets I made for my roofline, success there
* will complete the rest of the roofline mounts tomorrow
* will do the window frames tomorrow
* and if there's time, get the minitrees completed - so that they stand up - and still waiting on a roll of wire to finish the PI for them
 
Built a jig to start drilling 25mm conduit to upgrade from strips to pixels for my gutters and windows this year. Got the HoHoHos with it constantly going off centre so ordered some chromatrim instead 🤣🤣
 
Unfortunately for me, nothing is going up as we are dark this year due to major landscape renovations. As a typical male - I can't do two things at once.
This year I created:
13 pixel x tomato cage trees complete with stars.
16 x White LED Snowflakes - still not sure how I'm going to mount them in the air, - still need to make 16 more Blue LED Snowflakes
Created 4 x Pixel Fire sticks.
Created two more Main control cabinets, each housing 8 x 16 channel LOR CMB16 and 1 x Pixie16 Controllers (yeah I know)
Two more Audio cabinets: one housing an FM receiver and a 4 channel 100 watt amplifier feeding 4 x 100 watt outdoor patio type speakers and one cabinet housing 2 x Yamaha 100 watt Yamaha Receivers feeding 4 x TIC in-ground dynamic speaker and two x TIC in-ground Sub woofers.
Made a Dipole FM antenna for my transmitter.
Never managed to get my Midi Pixel tree created - I still have plenty of time for next year.
Still waiting on 24 strings of 50 injection molded square pixels to complete my pathway arches.
Still have to make another 16 strand LED Spiral tree.
 
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This year i have added a few different elements;
Garage Matrix 100 x 36 pixels
Swapped out spiral trees for mini trees
Roof Outline converted to pixels FINALLY!
Moved "Junior Trees" to outer flanks of display
Added a bunch of stars for lower wall.
And YES my yard looks terrible but its ok , I'm in landscape construction so it's perfectly acceptable not to look after your own😆

House 3 2022.jpg
 
TheRestOfTheLights.png
This week, I hope to put up most of the rest of the Halloween lights as marked in red (especially the trees, UPS willing). And change up the sequences a bit. I might not get to the stuff on the other side of the house, that's mostly not important until Xmas anyway but better to do it before the weather gets colder.
 
It might be easier on what I am not trying to do again.

Rebuilding mega tree, rebuilding 5 arches, building 2 spiral trees, rebuilding 25 peace stakes, adding 8 mini trees and stars, adding 8 snowflakes, PPD Geo Wreath. Sigh, too many things to get done in a month.

Oh yeah, putting together an entire new Halloween show also.
 
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