Lights

Christmas Lights!

Put a mega-tree on the roof
It all started a couple of years ago when we needed to find a suitable house to help care for an aging relative. All my previous hard work building and sequencing a customized display for our old house was going down the drain. The old house had tons of shrubs and provided a natural setting for lots of lights. Not so with the new house. Not a single shrub anywhere. My creativity languished for 2011 and all I did was put a 16’ inflatable Santa on the carport roof. It was a good location where the south end of our…
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RGB as simple as 1, 2, 3
There’s a technology heading for the decorative lighting world that has the potential to be a very disruptive force. Just as we try to get our heads around basic LEDs to displace incandescents, now we’re being asked to use something called RGB based lighting, meaning the lights can be told to change to any color of the rainbow. Good gosh. Can someone slow down so the rest of us normal people can catch up? LEDs are here to stay By now you probably already know the advantages of Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs). They only consume 10-20% of the power of…
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RGB colors
Pick a holiday. Now name the first three colors you associate with that holiday. If you are like most people, those who thought of Christmas were reminded of red and green, Hanukkah goers thought of white and blue, and Halloween enthusiasts came up with orange and purple. (Valentines = red/pink, St. Patty’s = green, etc. etc.) There was a time when picking colors for your holiday decor was easy. Why? Society had already done it for you. With few exceptions, we covered our houses in layers of red, green, white, and sometimes blue lights before spending hours at our computer…
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Waterproofing those connectors
Water, water, everywhere, but I can’t seem to keep it outta here! Here, being my light show, the water loves the electrical connections like I love Christmas displays, the difference being I like them turned on and bright and the water likes them shorted out and dark! How to stop the evil water infiltration? Giant sponges? No, too hard to wring out each day. Umbrellas? Nope, blocks the lights. Hmmmmmmm, who will stop the rain, do’h, that’s a line from a song! OK, so here are the standard ways to protect the lights: electrical tape and duct tape. They work,…
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Christmas car
Tim Smith takes lighting his car to an entire new level. We asked him why? “This is the 9th year I did it. Basically, it just makes everyone happier. When I take it downtown or in neighborhoods, you can see the atmosphere of the place just get lifted and I figure with the chaos that’s going on all over the place, if I can make someone forget about it for a few seconds and have them step out of reality and just smile then it is worth the time and effort put in. That is what makes it addicting. That’s…
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Squeezing more from your light controllers
Do you wish your light controllers had more channels? Me too. If you have recently joined the ranks of the “Computerized Holiday Lighting Crowd” you’ve probably figured out it takes a bit of an investment to get a decent display up and running. Controllers, light strings, extension cords, FM transmitters – it adds up quick. Most reasonable people operate within some type of budget when planning a light show, so where do you draw the line (from an investment standpoint) from year to year? Last year I learned the hard way why it makes sense to have a spare controller/board…
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4 x 4 Design
So it’s time to take the big step and animate your light display? Since most people use Light-O-Rama controllers we figured they would have a few tips on how to get started. We talked to John Potochnak and he said they’re now getting serious with simple plug and play solutions. Light-O-Rama is about make available 50 music sequences that should help bring animation to more displays. The challenge is everyone uses their light channels differently so it’s tough to create sequences that will work over a variety of venues. Luckily the pros have figured out a trick that will make…
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SuperStar Sequencer
For Christmas of 2008 I spent untold hours building my first SuperStar display using 288 segments of green and white rope lights. Controlled by 48 multiplexed channels it was a true example of Light-O-Rama’s motto of “imagine it, then do it.” Traditional mega-trees can spin, but my SuperStar could do patterns in all directions. Most importantly it could shoot beams downward from the star to the ground. The next summer I got an email from Light-O-Rama announcing a device called a Cosmic Color Ribbon. I thought, well they did it, they made my SuperStar display obsolete. With 12 Cosmic Color…
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Light-O-Rama
In 1975 Dan Baldwin was a newly minted computer science wizard and had just married his longtime sweetheart, Mary. That first Christmas together they bought a three foot tree upon Mary’s insistence and a family tradition was born. For the next 20 years that little tree, plus some accessories, was just about all the decorating the couple did for the holiday season. Something changed in 1995 when Mary took it upon herself to go outside and string a few lights along the top of the fence. Dan looked at her work and said “we need more lights!” Soon there were…
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What’s Christmas Expo?
We get this question, a lot. To most people Christmas is that time of year when there seem to be plenty of days off from work between Thanksgiving and New Year’s. Christmas trees start popping up like weeds. Then there’s the challenge about getting into something called the Christmas spirit. It’s hard to define this time of year but it’s hard not to notice most people do seem a little nicer. Then there’s the hassle factor. All the amateur shoppers hit the stores in search of presents causing traffic headaches and long lines at the checkout. Relatives come to visit…
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