Fireworks Lights for 2010

Made solid headway today, should be down to final assembly next.

All of the rope light segments for both fireworks are now corded and ready to go on.

 After finishing up the last of those, I painted the larger spokes, so those are ready for rope light.

I also got the LED C9's for the tips of the spokes ready to go. Turns out Action Lighting sent me sockets for SPT2 although I specified SPT1 and the order actually says SPT1. Since I live in the middle of nowhere and really can't afford to wait a week to get the right sockets here, I had to make it work. I just carefully positioned the wire in the sockets so that both sides were pierced, then cut little sections of wire tie as a spacer to hold the wire snug in the socket. It actually worked out just fine, so those are ready to go on as well.

Now I just need to get the rope light attached to the spokes and wiring done for each spoke assembly, finish my two JUMP poles and this one will be in the can. Such a chore!

ICE 2010

Each year a convention is held in Indianapolis for extreme Christmas nuts such as myself.  Folks travel from as far away as Arizona for this event.  This year, I was honored to present a session on dmx lighting for those assembled.  Later, we did a live demo of the new LPG flame generators that will be featured as a part of Seymour Lights 2010.

Working on the fireworks lights project

I finally got started this week on one of my 2010 projects, fireworks lights. This isn't an original design of mine; Joel Rose on the Do It Yourself Christmas Forum is doing a very similar project and I borrowed his basic design.

First I made the hub:

Next step was to weld up the spokes.  There are eight of these with four 6.5 foot stalks each.  I made a jig on an old sheet of board so I could make each of the units match.

Here are all eight spoke units welded up and ready to go.

And here's the hub on a temporary pole with the spoke units installed.  When it's mounted properly, it will slide on the pole and be pulled up by two cables and a winch.  There will be three guy wires attached to the bottom of the hub that will be tight when it's fully raised.

Next project are the 32 sections of rope light that need prepped and installed.

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2010 Channel Layout Finalized

I am sometimes asked what the schematic looks like for the dispay.  Well, I don't really do one of those, but there is a channel layout that shows what controllers/channels control what display elements.  I spent 8 hours laying it out today and I believe it is finalized. 

We added nine additional controllers from 2009..

2010 Channel Layour (PDF)

One Fan Down - Two More to Go

Alright, one fan completely done. Blue is finished.

This thing really ended up with a LOT of wire on it.  Pretty darn heavy too!

All folded up and ready to go off to storage in the folks' barn.

Two more to go. I am not sure if I will start on the next one right away or do another project in between... this REALLY got monotonous.

Progress on fans - new radio transmitter

It's taking about five hours per color to add the lights to the fans.  I spent the morning working on radio transmitter issues, so I only got half of the clear lights added to the first fan this afternoon.

I have also installed a new FM Transmitter.  This unit supports RDS which will enable me to send the current song playing, etc. to be displayed on the radio in most vehicles.  Since the transmitter is located in the garage and the show computer is in the office, I had to find a way to extend a serial connection from the computer to the rds encoder in the transmitter.  I used a serial over ip adapter to do so.  This converts the RS232 signal to tcp/ip packets which are then decoded by the adapter and sent to the serial port on the transmitter.