Thanks to a friend for the heads up! The 2012 Tour of Lights nominations are now being taken on the Chico Enterprise Record’s (ER) website. If you like the show that we put on and would like others to see it as well this is an easy way to spread the word. There are a couple homes in the Nob Hill area (West of California Park) that I plan to nominate that have their lights up already.
2012 Tour of Lights
2013 Light Show Shopping List
I know what you are thinking… the 2012 season is not even over! I know! But I need to start thinking of next year to purchase all the needed stuff.
The Plan
Greek (DIY Christmas style): PC to Ren64 to RenC to Grinch totaling 128 channels!
English: I will be building a new board/controller that is called a Renard 64 (Ren64). This board has 64 channels to control lights with (made by a guy with the last name Renard). I can then daisy-chain the Ren64 to the Grinch (Controller that I already have) through the Renard-595 Converter (RenC). This doubles the amount of channels that I have now!
The List
Ren64:
- Enclosure – CG-1000 Cable Demarc Enclosure
- PCB – $10.50 Through doityourselfchristmas.com
- Parts – 1x Mouser (list or Ren64 csv)
RenC:
- PCB – $8.00 Through doityourselfchristmas.com
- Parts – 1x Mouser (list or RenC csv)
- PIC Programmer: Parts – 1x Pickit2
SSRez:
- PCB – 16x $1.80 Through doityourselfchristmas.com
- Parts – 16x Mouser (list or SSR)
Continue reading
Chico Christmas Light show 2012 Starts Tomorrow
We are almost there. One more day until we “light up the house”. Sunset is scheduled for 4:46 PM, but we will start at 4:30 PM to work out any last bugs. Come by and say hi if you can.
For those of you that know our show from last years, we have moved to Chico, Ca and will be having the show here for the foreseeable future.
With the addition of more lights this year we have topped 10,000 lights and maintain the 64 Channels of dancing lights. I hope that you enjoy the hours/days/months that we have put into bring this show to the Chico area… because we absolutely love doing it!
Christmas Lights are 99% up in Chico!
We have all but a couple strands up, and a few that have gone out since we put them up.
2012 in Chico looks to be a very fun show featuring Trans SIberian Orchestra:Wish Lizst
The shows are usually around 15 min long, then loop. Still working on finding a good FM frequency to broadcast from … all the good ones are taken in Chico.
2012 Chico, CA here we come!
With Thanksgiving only 16 days away, we have started setting up! We kicked off November in style, by putting up Christmas lights on our new house. While setting up last year we decided that it would be good to get the lights up for testing well before the week of Thanksgiving. There is just way too much going on that week to be able to do anything else but be with family. So far we have about half of the lights up and only three controllers woking, but we are well on the way to being ready.
The plan is to start Friday Nov 23rd…
