In the last few weeks I’ve had a number of people asking about how the light show is done so I thought it might be nice to document how my lights are setup during the day using photos.
To see the display in action and to download all of the xLights sequences see the 2016 Debenham Lights post.
I’m going to write a series of posts showing how the controllers are setup, how the megatree is setup etc
All my sequences for this year are sitting at /lights/xLights-2016/ If you wish to use them on your own display you will probably need my xlights_rgbeffect.xml to import them properly.
There are videos for them all now on Youtube and on facebook/
xLights sequence download Edited music download
Each year I setup a display of Christmas lights in Narara.
This year (2015) I pretty much started from scratch as I moved to all pixels (each light is individually controlled)
Here are videos of my lights this year.
For those that are interested this is all controlled by a Sandevices E682 and Advatek Pixlite4 sitting in a large plastic tub.
The other day I was at Jaycar and saw that they are now selling small USB sticks that are arduino compatible. It is called the LeoStick and is made by Freetronics down in Melbourne. Seeing that it could pretend to be a USB HID device (ie keyboard/mouse) I wondered if I could do the sort of thing that the USB Rubber Ducky from Hak5 can do As it turns out the answer is YES :)
I was driving past one of those led advertising signs sitting on the side of the road the other day and thought to myself ‘I can do that’ So I’ve hooked up 6 of the freetronics DMD modules (in a 2x3 layout) and got down to coding up a way to do it. In the end I got it working by adding support for multiple buffers into my DMD library - github.com/cjd/DMD Since I have the ability to have multiple buffers I can now transition between buffers presentation-style. There are 8 transitions - wipe left/right/up/down, box in/out and cross in/out The following video demonstrates some of the transitions It is my sons first birthday in a few days so I thought it nice to create a moving sign for his party :) [youtube_sc url=“s4Qjski-WMY”]
I am now the proud owner of an Asus Transformer tablet (not the prime) and so wanted to update mtpfs to work better with it.
The biggest change was to add support for multiple storage areas. Now when you mount a MTP device which has internal storage and a MicroSD card (or similar) it shows up as two separate directories which you can access.
The download is available from mtpfs page
I had a little while free and so ported a bunch of games I wrote for the Peggy2 to work with a pair of DMD’s In doing so the games now run at 32x32 and are controlled by a Wii nunchuck. The games are snake, pong, breakout and race. The Arduino code is available at DMD_games.zip The two screens are daisy-chained but as the cable connecting them is quite short the top one is upside-down. To get this working the modified [intlink id=“55” type=“post”]DMD library[/intlink] is setup to handle rows of displays where odd-numbered rows are upside down. See this diagram for how it is laid out (for 2x2 case)
I recently got two Dot Matrix Displays from Freetronics - They are 32x16 LED panels that can be daisychained via SPI. It came with a quick library which worked okay but could do with a few enhancements ;) My modified library supports multiple displays (tested with 2x1 and 1x2 layout - but should work with other layouts) It also supports multiple fonts, marquee text, scrolling the display around and grayscale (grayscale sort of works - but not well :( ) I have updated the examples included in the original library to use these new functions.