Christmas Lights Synchronized to Music
I finally got the giant (11′ tall) candy cane up and running last night. It is made of PVC pipe, pink insulation board, black pallet wrap, and a lot of hot glue. I built the framework of 1/2″ PVC, then decided it wasn’t stiff enough, so I removed one section of PVC and added a […]
..both at the amount of work left to do and at the countdown calendar. I can’t believe I am approaching 30 days before ‘lights on.’ Last night I completed the north poles: I will not be able to work on anything tonight due to outside commitments, but I anticipate a productive weekend. I will try […]
Busy as a Christmas beaver around here 🙂 As much as I liked my arches last year, I felt like they needed a little ‘something’ to accent them. This year I decided to build some ‘north poles’ to put between the arches, and well as book end them. I built the first two last night. […]
It’s been a crazy season since my last update. We moved into temporary lodgings, closed on our new (to us) house, and then moved again! I am happy to say that we are all in, mostly settled, and construction for new display items is underway. Without giving too much away, I am building a large […]
We have officially given up possession of the England house to the new owner, and are in the final stages of paperwork towards closing on the new house. I went by the new place Saturday afternoon and took some measurements, which allowed me to start working on the display layout. I spent a good portion […]
I discovered this summer that our area had a new radio station, 107.9 Fountain Radio. This doesn’t seem like news, but they are using the frequency that I had previously used for my FM broadcast for the display! This year, I will need to select a different open frequency for the show, as well as come […]
Well, after a year and a half, we have finally sold our house and found a larger one. We have agreed to terms, and as long as inspections go through, we will move in during September. It’s exciting for us for a number of reasons, including the fact that this property is a corner lot […]
Yup, it was 100° today, and what was I doing? Working on Christmas stuff out in the garage. 🙂 I found some C9 strings for sale on Craigslist. Thanks to a seller that went out of her way to meet, I was finally was able to get them. There were a couple more than I needed […]
I have started building some new SSRs to use this year. While the current SSRezs work great, they are all in bulky enclosures, and each arch used two of these. While they weren’t really visible while watching the show, at least not to the point of being distracting, they did strike me as a little […]
My Xbee snap-in boards arrived today. I built them quickly tonight, installed them on a couple of my SS24’s: I fired up Vixen with a test pattern. Everything lit up like expected, and the test pattern worked like a charm. Here is a video: So far so good. Now I just need to come up […]
I scored four Xbee Pro wireless modules for a great price on Ebay. I will be able to use these for wireless connections to my controllers out in the yard once they are installed in a Ren-W board, and hopefully eliminate some Cat5 runs from the yard. Also pictured above in an Xbee USB explorer board, which is […]
The mobile version of our page launched today, so if you visit from your smart device, that will be the default page you will be directed to. If you prefer the full site, you can still view it by touching the tab at the bottom of the page. Let me know how you like the […]
Some of the new controller pcbs and parts have arrived, and I had time to assemble three of them this week: two Ren SS24’s and one Ren SS16. In the picture with them is an eight channel RenSS8, which I purchased already assembled by someone who was changing the direction of their display and no longer […]
The parts have started trickling in for the new controllers for next year’s display. If all goes according to plan I will add 144 channels worth of capability for a total of 384 channels. Whether I use all of them or not remains to be seen, but this will give me much more flexibilty. I’m […]
If you took photos or videos of the show this past season and are willing to share, I would love to have a copy. If I start to get some in, I will make a page for those, and give any credit due. Thank You!
I thought I would take a moment to welcome those of you who are visiting the site for the first time from the new Facebook page! I am working to have all of my social media ‘ducks in a row’ early this year. This will allow me some options for not only updates, but also […]
Progress has been made. Other than the ‘candy cane tree,’ all of the stuff has finally made it downstairs. Most of the lights have been put away. Many will not be used again, due to the fading of the colors. Most of the red, blue and green strands that have a couple years or more […]
I have yet to finish pulling all of the lights down, but I have made my first acquisition of new items for this year’s display: the pcb’s for two 8 channel controllers and two 24 channel controllers. The next step will be to secure parts to populate them. I plan to put one of the […]
…across the front yard. I’ll feel lost for a couple days, making my constant trips to the front window to view the lights along with my guests. There’s times where I feel like it has become an obsession: watching people watching the lights, constantly making sure the lights are running properly, checking the FM signal […]
By request, I will be running the lights tonight. I plan to do a partial evening on this coming Tuesday, as well. If you want to see the show, you are almost out of chances 🙂
Well, the show is winding down over the next couple days. Kind of a sad time for me. Most of you that know me, know I would run it year-round if I could 🙂 It has been a good show season, though. I met some nice people out in front of the house. I noticed […]
Hard to believe it’s that time already. Preparing to wind down the light show next weekend, so those of you who have only seen the pictures or videos and want to come by, this is the last week. I was going to add Auld Lang Syne to the show tonight, but other projects took over […]
My video hosting sites shows over 3100 plays for this week. Holy Cow! Almost 1000 are from this site alone. Pretty Awesome. Bruce
…other than mine 🙂 We went out to Longview Lake and drove through their display tonight. It is hard to capture the scope of the display in photos, but I am including a few anyhow: Following the display at Longview, we drove out to Raymore to visit Mike and Bobby Read’s display. They have […]
I checked in on my video page stats today, and was surprised to find that I have had over 2500 video loads in the last week, from 28 different countries! It still amazes me how small the world has become due to the internet. The largest single week I had before was somewhere in the […]
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