My name is Terry Sutton, I’m 73 yrs young, and I live in Nelson, at the northern end of the South Island of New Zealand with my wife of 48yrs, and I must admit that I have the “CLAP” - a “Christmas Lighting Addiction Problem”!
We have two adult children, a married son who is the Assistant Computer Network Systems Manager for a very large secondary school, and a married daughter, who trained for 3yrs in the US in French Mime, stage direction and performance, and she delivered us twin grandchildren two years ago.
I have always been involved in Electronics in one form or the other. My career started as a radio studio panel operator, then maintenance, and studio installation. This morphed into 25 odd years in television transmission, rising to Snr Technical Officer level, helping maintain some 80 + sites of TV and radio transmitting stations, big and miniscule, as well as some microwave links as a first line callout.
After the TV employment ended I was employed as a seasonal “Service Engineer”, maintaining labeling machines in the fruit industry for 15 years.
To keep my hand in I currently help maintain the local access radio station and it’s network of studios. I have been involved in church musical groups since I was a teenager, playing music, constructing instrument and PA amplifiers, as well as some instruments themselves. We also got involved in building and racing model powerboats, constructing the control gear myself, then, after a
back injury, I revived my interest in Model Railways, now “Christmas Lights” as well.
We have lived in our 117 yr old house for 40+ years and have always had Christmas lights up in one form or another. The bow window in the front lounge of the house has had a Christmas tree in it as long as we have been here. I built a pair of random timed Triac switches that have run the lights on the tree for 35 yrs or so which added some animation to the tree along with the store bought flashing strings. One year when we were late in putting the tree up, a neighbour asked “Where is the Tree??, we are waiting to see it!”
I discussed the possibility of computer animation of Christmas lights with a friend that had a large static display, he was keen to add it to their display, but his business was too all-consuming, and we never followed it up. When I finally retired I browsed several computer animation of Christmas lighting sites on the ‘net. While recovering from a dose of the ‘flu in late 2009 I found DIYC (Do It Yourself Christmas), Christmas lighting Forum based in the US, and the fount of knowledge available there was amazing.
I then rapidly built 120 Channels of a “Hill 320” controller from junk box stuff that I had lying around, also discovering that I already had sufficient opto-couplers and Triac’s to construst the solid state relays/Sswitches required to control the lights. A modified MP3 player with a RF booster amp provided the radio link and we were away. I went the “Hill 320” path because I had already built a model railway controller interface using an almost identical circuit some years before.
For information about my current setup click here!
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