Lights

Peter's Christmas Light Project

Have you seen this video that was spread around the internet last year. It's a house with Christmas lights that are set to music. I thought it was the greatest thing so I decided to build something like it for my house next year. So, a little planning and several trips to the local electronics store and I was ready to build.

So far my project consists of a 16 pin programable microcontroller, 16 MOSFETs, 16 relays, a transformer, rectifier and capacitors. My theory is that I'll use the microcontroller to give a signal to the MOSFET which will then turn on a relay that will give electricty to a strand of lights. So if I make 16 of them and hook them all up to the microcontroller then I'll be able to write a program to turn them off and on at any given time and sequence I want. The video above has 32 channels but I'm only doing 16 channels for two reasons. First, the redily available chip only has 16 channels and second, that's way too many lights for my small house and my budget.

Here's the schematic diagram I drew up. It looks and calculates good in theory. We'll see how well it works in reality soon.

So far so good. Here a picture of all the relays glued and wired

And here's a picture of all the MOSFET's soldered to the board and wired underneath.

And finally, after many hours of soldering, stripping, twisting, tucking, gluing and cutting, here is the finished controller. I wrote a simple program to show that all relays switch on and off independently of each other and IT WORKED! "IT'S ALIVE!". It was pretty exciting to hear all those realys turning off and on in different rythms. Now all I have to do is put it in a nice box and wire up all 16 of those black wires to a plug recepticle and plug in some light strands.

Here's a picture of the back of the main control box top. These are all the plugs and I added a switch to each plug so I can turn the lights on manually. This way I can turn on the ones I want to leave on all night wihout having to unplug them from the box and into an outlet. I can change what colors I want to turn on every night or whatever I want. I also added a power swithch to the circuit board so I can turn just that off and keep the plugs hot.

Here' s a picture of the entire controll box with the cover off. I wanted to find some power strips that I could convert into individually controlled recepticals but everything I found wasn't goint to be very compact so I made these power strips out of aluminum angle and cut the top of the box to fit.

I added a fan and a exterior switch to reset the computer chip so I can time it with the music properly.

I soldered all 16 of those AC output wires to the hot side of each of the plug recepticals. The two extra recepticals are for power input. All I have to do is plug in power and then plug in the christmas lights! Exciting!

So, there it is. All ready to take a program. The 9 pin serial port on the side is to hook up to my laptop to program the microchip and the fan on the front is to keep the components cool.

All the switches next to the plugs are to turn each light strand on manually and the small switch in the middle is the chip reset.

WHOOHOO ... I'm done building and it works well.

I drew my house on a piece of paper and put a LED in the general area of where the strand will be, then wired it all to the box so I can see what's going on when I program. Here's a low quality video of one of the songs. The video framerate is slow so you don't see ALL of the light pulses but you'll get an idea.

Here you can see I took over a couple shelves in the garage pantry. On the top shelf to the right is the laptop computer, to the left of that is the 12V Power Supply/Charger. It's hooked up to the batteries on the very back left and the small black box with the green light is the FM transmitter. This is so the music can be heard from any house, car or portable radio within a block or two on Channel 88.9FM

A couple shelves below that you can see the grey box that I built with all the extension cords coming plugged in. Yep, count 'em, there's 18 extension cords there, 16 for lights and 2 for power. On the left is a power strip to plug in the 12V charger and the laptop.

Well, it's all done. I wrote 4 songs so far and they take anywhere from 4 hours to 10 hours to write each song. Here are my more elaborate two .

CLICK HERE TO WATCH WIZARDS IN WINTER

CLICK HERE TO WATCH CAROL OF THE BELLS

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