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.