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.
Okay - now that I have a box it is time to wire it all up.
After playing around with various methods of switching I settled on a bunch of solid-state relays connected to the arduino.
The advantage of solid-state relays over mechanical onese are that they switched quicker, are less likely to arc and don’t require any additional components to up the voltage in order to throw them. I ended up with a bunch of FSS1-102Z relays which can be bought from jaycar for about $12 each as part SY4088.
The aim was to start with 10 outlets and build out from there.
To make things easier I decided to make a box with room for 10 standard 240V wall powerpoints.
Each powerpoint is 117x70mm so allowing for two columns of five points (with space between each to allow for plugpacks)I ended up with a base of 250x460mm. I ended up making the box 220mm deep so that it wouldn’t fall over (the exact dimension was mostly determined by the size of the piece of wood I had)
Last Christmas was my first Christmas in my very own house (was renting before) and so I was able to put up more lights than before. In the process of setting up the lights I thought about making them computer controlled (so as to sync to music etc)
I had some X10 appliance modules which did the job for turning them on/off at the right times of day, but there was so much lag that I couldn’t use it for anything fancy. As such I started looking around for how to do this properly. Most of the stuff I found was only available in the US and/or was very expensive so I figured I’d just do it myself :-)