Lboucher wanted a snazzy Christmas light show this year so he pulled out his Parallax BS2 microcontroller and got to work.
"I have always wanted to copy those crazy uTube videos of christmas light to music. Well i finally looked into it and found that everyone is generally using Light O Rama. Which is cool, but cost dam near 800 bucks for 32 channels. So i thought i would build it all myself. So i grabbed my BS2 from my Boe Bot, bought 20 1AMP PC board relays off of ebay for 15 bucks. I made my own relay boards, threw together a very dirty housing for them with 16 outlets, put up all my lights, laid out alot of extension cord and wrote a gui in Visual C++ to controll the lights over serial. At first i tried just programming the BS2, quickly found that to be very limiting, not really surprising. Overall it is working out very well."
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Hey whats that song called ive looked everywhere for it.
Cheers
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Great work. I’ve been thinking of doing this for years, but a lot of the stuff on computer christmas and planet christmas is over my head. Plus I’ve been thinking that I’d like something more creative than.. door, bush, door, bush, window, gutter, gutter, door, bush… etc
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Just a tip, it seems like you have wired up each outlet (pair of 2 plugs) to be on one circuit. To save space and money on outlets, you can break off the tabs between the top and bottom plugs and you can put each individual plug on its own circuit.