The Lights Are On!

Just a few minutes ago, my 2002 Lights Display was switched on! This last week has been busy for me getting it all ready, and the hard work has finally payed off. My microprocessor-controlled Light Trees look fantastic, and the LED "Foreverbright" lights, 1300 of them in the bushes, are great too. I love the deep colour of the blue sets. I`ll be getting more of those for sure, especially when I remember that those 1300 LEDs must take only about the power of a regular 100 bulb superbright set. When they come on they hardly show at all on my power monitoring gear.

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The Live Webcam has the first preliminary pictures of the setup, at:

http://electriclights.tripod.com/displays

Real photos/video stills will follow as soon as I have the time and resources avaliable to do them.

Finally, the Light Count? 8117 bulbs! A personal record, and probably a neighborhood record of some sort too, though I don`t know for sure.

One word:

WOW.

Very nice!

wow!

has anyone seen that christmas show with chevy chase??? kinda reminds me of that

Hmmmm....kinda reminds me of Tim the Toolman Taylor..."must have more power!"

Very, very nice.

LOVIN' the LEDs!

Thanks guys, glad you like it!

The LEDs are actually not too visible in that shot. They are all in the front bushes, an edge of which can just be made out to the far left of the photo (blue and red ones). The blues are stunning, I have them in the tallest bushes covering maybe 1/3 of the front, and it is just a wonderful colour.

I`ll buy a film for my Brother`s old Olympus OM10 soon and see if I can persuade it to take any decent photos. One of the places in town can develop straight to a CD which is handy since I have no Scanner. Probably won`t get the opportunity till next weekend but I`ll see what I can do.

Just thought I`d let you all know that the first lot of nighttime photos are now on my Displays site at http://electriclights.tripod.com/displays . I took them using the Olympus camera I mentioned up there, but lack of experience or even a fault in the camera, meant a lot of them were desperately out of focus and un-usable. I did manage to save about half of them, either by pure luck that they were in focus, or by a bit of Photoshop fiddling. More will be taken with an automatic camera, or possibly my usual video/stills method, at a future date when the weather improves.

The gallery section is not finished but the first photos are there. I`ll work on things some more and try to make it more presentable tonight (currently some broken images, etc). Don`t try viewing large images in the Webcam Archive cos they aren`t there, and that section isn`t finished, for obvious reasons.

BTW the LED lights are the blue, white, red and yellow ones in the front bushes. There are also deep reddish Maroon lights to the left but they are not LEDs.
The blue colour didn`t come out as deep as it actually is in reality, I guess you`ve just got to be here

I'm just imagining what you could do with a string of RGB led's and a PIC to make the whole chain change colors and fade and such...

The possibilities, (as well as the pottential price of such a thing) boggle the mind

An interesting concept!

In the upstairs middle window I have a string of 50 red/blue bicolour LEDs I got from Craig at the LED Museum, currently they are connected to a crude binary counter/changeover relays circuit that makes them go from red to purple to blue and back again. Somewhere I have a controller based around two op-amps that independantly fades the red/green halves of another string of 20 RG diodes up and down slowly, resulting in a random wash of colour. I hoped to use this for the RB ones but honestly don`t know where it is! Maybe next year...

I`ve always wanted to do something with the RGB ones, but have been put off by a few things. First, they cost an absolute fortune! Second, it takes a dog`s age to hand make the paralell strings of lights, and at the end of making my 50 RB set, I was totally sick of soldering LEDs! Third, so much power is needed. A 2 amp bench power supply drives my RB controller, and each half pulls an amp (50 LEDs, 20mA each). Finally I havn`t got a clue how to program and work with PICs!

But yes, it is something I would eventually love to do, even if only in a small way. The result of thousands of these things controlled in sections by PICs/one PC with multiway output card, I can only imagine, would be spectacular! A small tree in my window doing rainbow fades would be pretty neat too...

Originally posted by Chris M.:
and the LED "Foreverbright" lights, 1300 of them in the bushes, are great too.

Click to expand...

<font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">Aha! So THAT's why I can't find these online...you bought 'em all!

rusty

Actually Darell did, he was just nice enough to let a few of us buy them off him.