RockinChristmas

Everything in the show has been working pretty good for about a week now and I've been able to get most of my 2010 songs upgraded to include some programming for the new display items, mostly using RGB in a very basic way.  I've been sequencing using LOR S3 and running the show using Xlights.  Xlights has been stable.  Sometimes using it results in crashes, but once I leave it alone ... it generally works fine.

I had my first major outage tonight, when I noticed the 'tune to' sign wasn't working.  After going outside, I realized the entire big megatree was out, and so was the neighbors house, my fence and about 30% of my house.  So I finally found that a Cat5 coupler that seemed to be iced over and I removed it and was able to restore one controller at a time.  Finally I got the LOR network working again ... and it basically seems like it was ice cold connections and not much more.  It took about 30 minutes to debug and fix.  It seems that when a connection gets bad, that it then creates a bad signal back towards the house and knocks out other nearby controllers as well.  I have never seen this before.  And I guess score a point for the Lynx and Pixelnet controllers, as they were going strong and the DMX wireless was also keeping all the other stuff going, even while I had 9 of 17 controllers knocked out by this.

Meanwhile, the girls and the neighbor kids were out dancing in the driveways and having a good ol' time.  Its funny how they enjoy dancing around in the snow to the music and under the lights.  I have to admit, their childhood memories are going to be really unique (in a good way).

Last night, Brian (FireMedic4Christ) came over and we finally got his smart string stuff working ... it's nice to be able to help out another fellow Christmas Lighting pro.  His show over in Parker is great and rumor has it that his entire cul de sac may be lit up in 2012 !  We had to program his PIC chips on his Smart String Controllers and earlier this week, we got his Hub and DMX dongle reflashed as well.  Now he is going to up and running with ~1000 channels of Pixelnet in no time!  I also helped him get his LOR S3 configuration straight.  This stuff is not for faint of heart.

So I got the show up an running by Wednesday night (12/7) and just running the 17 LOR controllers only.  I also was able to get my 2011 configuration file done and a bunch of songs from 2010 converted into 2011 versions to use.  So at this point I have a good collection of converted songs I can play nightly till the rest of the show comes together.

I've not got the pixelnet network up and running and so far I can test everything I've connected using the xlights tester (which is nice, btw).  I've been able to run converted LOR songs as well, but am staying with the LOR scheduler for now, just because I'm used to it and there is no rush to switch just yet.

At this point I need to finished hooking up the 3rd mini megatree and its star topper ... and then I'll have the main new show items all connected.

Last night I lit up the entire spiral megatree with 4800 lights on it and it was very bright! .... it seems like my estimate of 16-17 amps was about right for it.  No problem, I got it on a 20a dedicated and I will rarely every run everything like that.  I used my ted5000 to monitor the whole house kilowatts and watched it jump up as I turned on all the lights on the spiral.  I then converted it to watts and then amps at 120v.

So what remains after that would be the 'nice to have' items, like (4) rgb arches [ should be easy ], (2) coroflakes [ haven't built them yet ], (3) boxheads [ haven't built them yet, not sure if I even will ] and Josh' Coro Northstar [ built it, he's just waiting for a clear roof to install it I think ]. 

I did manage to shovel off my back patio roof enough to gain access to the roof last night and connected the missing coupler to complete my pixelnet backfeed to the North Mini Megatree#4.  At this point, that is now working.  The entire DMX wireless also seems to be working fine, as well as both Passive Smart String Hubs and the main Smart String Hub.  Looking at the power use of the new items, its almost nothing.  These new RGB LED(s) just don't take much power.  I ran all the toppers (all nodes) on full power and maybe used 50 watts total.  It was like .104 kilowatts or so ... nothing in my book!

Working pretty hard on the 2011 LOR configuration file to make groups for everything.  This is making the organization of my entire show a LOT BETTER !!  I am addicted to the groups and groups of groups capabilities.  It allows me to say make groups for arch sections, then group all the sections into an arch.  Then I can group all the arches into an "all arches" group.  Then I have options to either program all the arches at once, program an arch at a time, or an arch section at a time, or even a node in a arch at a time (crazy, no thanks).

Ok, well not really ... but my hands are scraped up, dry and generally hurting all the time.  There is blood on my hands just about every time I go out.  Usually I have no idea what the cause was, but working a lot with rebar, metal, saws, sharp wire and broken lights ... will do that to you!   Anyways, I'm working as hard as I can to get everything outside and setup, then there are the miles of extension cords to connect and about 17 LOR controllers to setup, 7 Lynx Express controllers to setup, a couple of Lynx Hubs, a couple Lynx Passive Hubds and an entire DMX and Pixelnet universe to wire up and get talking to the computer.  Then after that, I have to make the software talk to it all ... and then make it respond to the music and setup the FM radio station.  So anyways, just a lot to do and not enough time (or good weather) to do it.  But  I'll keep on going till its done and works.

Ok, so there is a new machine that every man needs ... a 40' lift.  Josh rented the lift this year to get his house done in record time ... and it was "money" as he kept saying.  He got the entire house done and wired up in a day.  We also got the snowflake wall, all 6 snowflake spinners, the big megatree pole and the spiral megatree up ... in a day !!  We even used the lift to place the new spiral megatree star topper on.  

I tested out the RGB mega balls (giant ornaments that change colors) with my TM1804 field tester and they all worked and look amazing.  

And what most people don't realize are all the jaw dropping surprises I have in mind for this year.   I've also got a recording artist from Austrialia who offered us a Christmas song to use in the show.  In additional, we may have our first show sponsor.  I'm also hopeful that we take up a charity collection for a good cause, like St Jude's Childrens Hospital.

Ok, so I got all the roof C9(s) up in a day on Friday afternoon and Saturday morning.

This year I just felt like I was twice as fast as in any year previously.  I don't why, but maybe I just had better focus this year.

On Saturday, I didn't get much done, since I was coaching volleyball games from 2 till 8 pm. 

On Sunday, my brother Tom came over and we got the star base on the roof and carried up ten sandbags ... between 600 and 700 pounds ... so that star isn't going anywhere.  I think the first year, I did 6 bags.  Last year I did 8 bags (and had even bigger winds) ... and this year, just to be safe ... 10 bags.  It turns out, carry sandbags on your shoulder and up a ladder isn't that bad ... and when your awesome brother is helping you, it goes twice as fast!

I got all the lights tested and only 2 bad bulbs out of all the lights ... and that the entire roof times 3 colors (red, green and clear). 

My Dad dropped by and delivered the mini megatree toppers, complete in their new weatherproof skirts.  I actually need to put in the smart strings and then splice them back together, test them installed ... and then put silicone caulk all around the skirt to call those "done".  I keep realizing there is always another job to be done.

Tom and I also fixed a bad GFCI circuit and replaced it with a new 20amp GFCI.  We discovered that one of the screws on the outlet cover was badly rusted, so it was proof that the outlet cover isn't really waterproof and it probably shorting out during the year sometime.  I've never had it blow during the show (during Dec) ... but it had gone back twice now in 3 years.  So I just purchased a weatherproof in-use cover to cover it with, and hopefully that will protect against future GFCI replacements?

I also have 12 DMX controllers to program for Josh (for the Coro Northstar) ... and also have to finish labeling all the new controllers and programming their DMX channel ranges.  I have everything figured out in a spreadsheet, but doing it is the hard part, esp. those little $8 DMX controllers ... which you have to wire up to a computer to program ... and the software (while free), is very buggy and takes multiple tries to work.