I now have available over 1,200 channels of Renard 64 fully dimmable controllers housed in three old computer cases. With my background in radio studio’s and television transmitter/translator installations etc, I operate my gear completely differently to the US “norm” in that I have all my controllers, switches and power supplies relatively centrally located. The solid state relays are all constructed on strip board, and mounted in plastic lunch/freezer boxes inside modified surplus plastic battery electric drill cases, they are set up as 8, 16, 24, 32, or 40 channels per box, as required.
These are then run out to the display items in heavy duty multi-cables in multiples of eight, with appropriate professional heavy duty plugs and sockets for each cable run.
Setting up is relatively “simple”, for example two eight channel arches run out in one 18 conductor cable, with 16 conductors carrying the power feeds from the solid state relays to the light strings, and the return running back through the two spares plus the very heavy shield. Naturally this is only for the low voltage items, which is most of the display. The few mains strings I use have long tails attached and they are run from 2 x four socket, modified multi-boxes, connected to 230 volt solid state relays, also mounted in plastic lunch/freezer containers for safety, as well as being inside a modified old plastic battery electric drill cases. The solid state relays are connected to the Renard 64’s with 9 pin “D” range extension cables (8 Channels + Common return), of which I now have a large box.
This is a very expensive method of setup if one had to buy all the cabling hardware, thankfully I had access to the necessarys for free as it became available when the business was closed, and we were made redundant. Otherwise it would all have been residing in a very large skip, or have been converted into "Beer Money!!"
I am heavily indebted to the local recycling centre as the source of the “unwanted” plastic battery electric drill cases, many, many, tens of metres of power cable, old UPS transformers, armfuls of gazebo frame tubing plus their fittings, many strings of old Christmas lights, and old mains fuse carriers, that work perfectly in my application. I have been able to purchase these items for relatively small money, and put them into service in my setup, keeping them out of landfill for now.
We have a problem here in NZ acquiring light strings in individual colours as the “Big Box” stores seem to like to stock multicoloured strings, or white. To overcome this problem I have spray-painted all my individually coloured incandescent strings myself up until now. Only in the last two years have I been able to purchase some LED strings, at reasonable prices, with some in individual colours. These have been modified for my application, with extra resistors for current protection, bridge rectifiers installed to operate on my AC switches and are in service this year.
I plan the channel layout on a 1900+ line spreadsheet which has gone through a number of iterations. This is a huge help prior to setting up Vixen 2.1x, the sequencing program that I use, ensuring that I plan the individual strings of lights in the correct order for the display demultiplexer, or controller, and the switches from the start.
I built a two panel “Ledtrix” a 16 x 96 “LED” matrix display five years ago. The panel is 2.4m long by 500mm high, has 1,536 LED’s in it, which are all hand wired, and run with a “PixC” interface. They are driven by “LTC”, a command line utility triggered by the sequencing program. This allows me to “talk” to the assembled viewers without “saying” anything!!. We also have a pair of small commercial LED display panels out on the front fence to reinforce the FM Transmitter frequency to the viewing public.
A small Chinese manufactured FM stereo transmitter now provides the RF FM Transmission to the cars using a Low Power FM frequency. The transmitter has a pair of professional studio quality audio peak limiters in front of it to keep the peak audio levels under control. The audio input rack also houses a couple of power amplifiers, (Ex a discarded car radio), which allowed me to place speakers in the front garden, operating “very quietly”, so that those “passers by” that do not have a radio with them can hear the music.
The complete system operates on two 10 amp power cables. Each cable passes through an earth-leakage controlled circuit breaker, mounted in a portable “switchboard” case. This also houses a pair of miniature clamp meters inside to monitor the current on each cable.
After the Earth Leakage Circuit breakers are a pair of 25 amp commercial heavy duty solid state switches, ex Photocopiers, which allow automation of the power to the display.
To do this I derive 9v DC from a plug-pack, plugged into a mechanical time switch, set to turn on ½ an hour before the “show” and off ½ an hour after the “show”, this turns the power to the display on and off respectively. I discovered that my biggest waste of power has been transformer core losses, both in the mains isolation transformers, for the mains strings, and the step down transformers to run the low voltage, (12 volt, 24 volt, and 35 volt) items. Selecting the best combination of transformers to do the job saved me a huge amount of power cost last year, converting a large number of lights to LEDs this year should reduce the power consumption even more.
From my meagre beginnings in 2009 with 120 channels, this year we have now climbed up to around 1000 Channels, of individual strings, and around 51,000 lights. The neighbours are thankfully very supportive, and we have been selected as prize winners in a local radio station run Christmas Lighting Competition in two of the seven years.
The 2016 season produced a vehicle count around the 1800 + cars as well as about half that number of folk on feet, with lots of very positive comment. Considering the local population is only around the 46,000 mark we feel very honoured, and humbled, to see the number of cars we do, considering we are one of only two “computer animated” displays in the district.
The Setup
