Live Light Show

For reasons I noted in my previous post, X-10 simply isn’t feasible for the type of setup I want. It’s too slow. But it sure makes wiring a breeze! As I put up our standard decorations this year, I realized that there was one decoration that X-10 may make sense for. The candles in the [...]

Now we get to have some fun and start looking at actual equipment and electronics. Since we’re going to use the industry standard DMX control protocol, we should be able to leverage that in deciding what to use to control the lights and other things in the holiday display.
As I noted in an earlier post, [...]

If the nodes that control the power to the light strings and fixtures will be networked, that requires some type of communication medium (wire or wireless) and a protocol for communicating with the nodes.
Most people when they hear you want to network something instantly think ‘Ethernet‘. What many people don’t [...]

The next few posts will outline some of the ideas I have for how the show will be run. From hardware to software and even specifics about what type of lights to use and how to string them together.
To get things started, I want to talk about the electrical side of things.

One of the main ideas behind this project is to not only make the display interactive, but to allow people to follow the development of the display over time, make suggestions, comment on the designs, etc. Blog software fit those requirements to a ‘T’.
I have a lot of experience with the WordPress blog software, [...]

"Dude! That’s so been done already!"
Why exactly would I want to create an interactive holiday display for my house? Plenty of folks have done it, with a couple actually forming new companies around the hardware and software they developed for their holiday light displays. Thanks to these companies (Light-O-Rama and Animated Lighting are two) and [...]