Local Artist Helps Out

Do you hear what I hear !!

For a while now, the second weatherproof speaker enclosure formerly known as the doghouse was given to a locally known artist for total makeover. For the longest time, the doghouse was an ugly dark green and was in a sad state of disrepair. The Artist is none other than Beverly Fetch of Willamina and my wife's mother. She accomplished a miracle in producing a weatherproof version of a gingerbread house complete with lots of yummy but plastic candy! Its gonna look fantastic out in the yard and hopefully nobody will try to eat it. Our thanks goes out to Beverly for helping us make a wonderful display.

Sign of the Times

Due to the large number of Light Elements to build this year, most of my builds were made somewhere between our garage and our computer alcove in the house. My wife, while a big help to me, still wanted to move it all out to the garage and for the most part, I agreed with her. There are workbenches and lots of storage for all the items being built or have been built. Now, I mostly use the garage to make the mess.. err make the lights for the display. One of my friends at work was joking about me being a secret elf, making items but not currently displaying them outside. So then, I decided to name my new build area and call it The Secret Elf Workshop. All good workshops have a sign to proudly let people know that they are working there and what they make. My wife did a wonderful job painting the new sign and then I added the lights. A lot of people have expressed an interest in animating their lights. Who knows, it might even catch on to being a seasonal business.

VIXEN in the off-season

Monster Mash

Time between Christmas shows is a long time to be sure, but what can you do during that time? How about giving VIXEN, the Grinches and the SSRs another job for other holidays? Having some spare time and Halloween coming up, we decided to make a small display using some leftovers from a yard sale purchase. Sometimes you don't know whats in the bottom of the box. Buying a set of 8 plastic pumpkin candy pails and putting a string of white lights in each of them, a unique set of Halloween lights were made. Adding a strobe, some strings, bone lights and such will round out the display when it is put up. Shown above are the pumpkin lights that were made and they will be zip-tied to the rail along with other light elements.

Christmas Future

It has just turned September and we are looking forward to setting up the display for this year. Even so, we are also looking ahead to next year with a bit of preplanning and also some wishful thinking. Next year's upgrades promise to be even more spectacular with the addition of 16 more SSRs! The Light Fences will be doubled as well as the Minitrees. Megatree #2 will be upgraded to match Megatree #1. Strobe lights will be added and the Side Light Trio will be broken up and each will have its own channel. The Secret Elf Workshop will be lighted including the back fence. Hopefully more inflatables will be added along with more roof lighting. More props and lighting are already in the works and probably some we haven't even conceived of yet. It will be interesting to see what the future will bring.

Reuse, Replace, Recycle and Restore

When you don't buy new Light Elements, then you have to use what you have or what you have bought secondhand from yard sales, Craiglist or wherever you find them . Buying secondhand usually means it's been used more than you would like. Having bought at least seven yard reindeer from yard sales, it was clear that they also were used more than I would have wanted. But oh well you find what you find where you find it. Hopefully at a decent price. Once you get your treasures home, you start by spending several hours replacing bulbs, straightening wire runs, ziptie-ing parts together, cleaning, repainting and testing. I managed to bring 4 of them back to life and near perfect working order. Shown below is "Prancer", one of the largest reindeer in our herd. A bit of time spent will bring a nice return once the show starts.

Shown below is "Olive". You know, Olive the other reindeer? This is what she looked like when I brought her home. Her previous owner obviously thought the more the better. But sometimes this is just not true. In fact, I was feeling a bit sad about how this poor thing was looking trussed up like a Christmas goose. Putting her on my workbench, I set about correcting her situation.

After about an hour of undoing the proverbial Gordian Knot, shown is what was actually on Olive and yes, those are icicle lights. The green string can be reused elsewhere after some new bulbs are added to it. However, the other 3 white strings will not be reused on Olive because of wire breaks that had been taped up. We might be able to salvage some of them to make other Lighted Elements in the future.

Olive after surgery.

When reusing strings of lights, remember that "SAFETY" is always more important than anything. Wire breaks, broken bulbs, exposed wire, bad plug prongs, wrong, burnt or missing fuses, burnt or melted bulb housings are just some of the things that can go wrong with a light string. Make sure that the strings you are using are in good working order before you install them. Properly maintained lights will insure that shock hazards will be elimanated and not pose a risk to yourself, your family, your home or the viewing public. When in doubt, just pull all the bulbs out and throw away the string.

When in Doubt, Throw it out!!!

Away... in the Manger

While walking along a street near my work, I happened upon a yard sale that had a 3 piece Nativity set for the bargin price of 12 dollars. Seeing that the set was barely used, it was a great deal and I purchased it. Taking it home, it was plain that it needed a bit of dressing up to make it a focal point for our Show. We happened to have some large oak pallets on hand. I decided to cut them up and make a Manger for our three new additions to our show. Also as an additional benefit, it will hide the ugly Natural Gas Meter. Shown is the difference between Night and Day viewing. When it's set up for Christmas, I'll add in some dry grass around the figures to hide cords and make it look more like real straw strewn about. Maybe later, we can find some barnyard type animals or if we're lucky the 3 Kings to go with it. It will stay lit and not flash like the rest of the system. Not all props are the commercial, non-religious type and this prop really brings out the reason for the season as they say.

SSR Anatomy 101

The loyal minions of the Grinches are the SSRs (Solid State Relay) which control the actual off and on of the light elements out in the yard and on the house. Each are made up of a number of individual parts all acting to perform the Grinches' bidding. We built our SSRs from scratch more or less using a pre-etched circuit board from Austrailia. We populated each board with parts bought from USA companies as shown below at center. In the front of the board is the connector coming from the Grinches that leads to 4 smaller circuits which in turn control the TRIACs. TRIACs are electronic AC switches and generate a lot of heat doing their job. To the right is a heatsink made from a carpet step bar using it to draw away heat from the TRIACs keeping them cool. On the left is a power distrubution block made from a pair of standard AC outlets with the neutrals (white wires) sharing a common path to the circuit board. Each socket on the block is independant and each has a hot wire (black wires) leading to the circuit board. On the pieces of wood in the block are pieces of masking tape to identify the job of each socket. As the system evolves each year, each SSR may change its job but pretty much performs the same function.

Shown below is the screen VIXEN uses to display current patterns of the Light Show. Black lines represent items which are being used as props, such as the star, house, trees and fences. Yellow lines represent AC lines running from the light elements to the SSRs shown as a red block. AC lines will connect SSRs to branch lines and then to trunk lines leading back to the panel boxes supplying the whole system with power. Multiple layers of systems acting as one make for a really nice display of blinky flashy. For our first year of computer controlled lights, we decided to only use half the capacity of our system because we didn't have enough resources and time to get everything online before Christmas. With the basic system in place this year, it will be easy to add the other half and upgrade the display with almost double the lights next year! Its amazing that with only 16 SSRs with a combined total of 64 channels, so much brillance can be created to bring joy and wonder to all that see it.