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LightChristmas 
Beta Testers 
Joined: 15 Oct 2007 Location: Equality, IL Online Status: Offline Posts: 993 |
 Quote Reply
 Topic: HiPosted: 03 Sep 2008 at 7:47pm |
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Hi.
My name is Earl Flanigan (aka LightChristmas) (group says boredly) "Hi Earl...." And, well, I've been a light addict since October of 2006. Its not really my fault though! This guy...uhhh....we'll call him Darryl....well he kind of sells me all this stuff, you know? (group gasps in shock) Okay, the straight story..... Wife sees the Carson Williams video on the 'net. Seeing as how I'm an engineer, she quips the predictable "Why don't you do that?". Oy... So, I study the video, analyze how to do it, get Dasher, a D/A board and a bunch of SSRs. Not thrilled with it - just doesn't have the pizazz. Discover D-Light. Cheaper than LOR, so go with 32 channels of ACx8 controllers. Everything worked well until it was time to get the scheduler going - crash, crash, play awhile, crash. GRRRRR. Then out of the Southeast a lone figure appears in the barren wastes of Spectrum. Guy goes by the handle "LightsOnLogan", and he has a scheduler that actually works with Spectrum files! Welllll, I'm impressed!! Naturally, the show was saved using the LightsOnLogan Player! Yes, we all know and love him, its none other than our esteemed Admin of this forum, and creator of Aurora! Kept telling him to start charging for it, and to try and hook up with D-Light to solve the sequencer/scheduler problems. Prophetic words? Fast forward to April '07. Order more controllers (64ch worth), start creating sequences, and discover that Spectrum won't allow more than 48 channels! Drop a note to the Darryl and the support board about it. A month later, that problem is fixed, but now I can't set my event markers (beats) accurately because the darned thing jumps and stutters.Grrrr. Go back to earlier version that doesn't stutter, but has the channel limitation. Jump to October '07. Get a PM from LightsOnLogan asking if I want to beta-test a sequencer he's working on. Well, the rest of the story is all here on this forum if you do a search. |
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Pony_God
Senior Member 
Joined: 01 Sep 2008 Location: Naples, FL Online Status: Offline Posts: 551 |
Quote Reply
Posted: 03 Sep 2008 at 10:04pm |
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Hi Earl...
Chris Barr here, only Pony_God you'll ever meet, had the nickname since high school.
Tara Barr (guess who that is) will find out about you all here soon after Firefly gets here.
This is my first time touching a sequencer.
We've been decorating more and more every year, adding some each year. Well last year I got Tara a Mr. Christmas Lights and Sounds last year, not bad for what it is. Then we saw "What's up with THAT Christmas House". One of the guys was running Animated Lighting, so I started there. Then I saw the price! Ended up over with our favorite dealer... He's got some good shiznit. Of course she has no idea that I'm looking into any of this yet.
So this year I'm giving her 4 ACx16s, 1 Firefly, and a parterage in a pear tree. Well, there's a ton more to supposrt a fully computerised show (AND TONS MORE LIGHTS).
If you look at out D-Light's user's map (http://www.frappr.com/?a=mygroups&id=5346827), you can see a bit more.
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JohnnyL
Pre-Order User 
Joined: 17 Dec 2007 Location: Merced Ca Online Status: Offline Posts: 67 |
Quote Reply
Posted: 03 Sep 2008 at 10:21pm |
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Im John Libecki, nickname comes from work. too many of us named John. Mr Flanigan, i too was a victim of Carsons madness. weve been lighting our home since my kids were babies. now i have grandbabies :). 07 was our first season with animated lights. 96 channels. My brother and Nephew are both afflicted with this light disorder too. my brother runs 128 channels D-Light and Nephew has about 160 channels LOR for his home and 160 LOR for a Make A Wish display hes doing this year.
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Slinkard
DMX 
Joined: 10 Dec 2007 Location: El Cajon CA Online Status: Offline Posts: 243 |
Quote Reply
Posted: 04 Sep 2008 at 10:46am |
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how's it going I am Lee Slinkard, known around my parts as just Slink (old military name, wonder where they got it from?) Guess I'll jump in and say Hi!I wish I could say that carson got me into this, or that cool Budlight spot they run during the holiday's.
But atlas it was a 1 dollar bet from a co-worker.
See about 4 years ago me and a co-worker were shooting the, well you know. We started to talk about the houses that we have seen on the net. he bet me $1 that I couldn't do it. Now we are both Network engineers so to just lay out that easily of a bet wasn't going to happen. I had 7 days from 10:30am december 9th.
So the search began. on the 15th i was in the office at 10pm putting into place the following set-up
1 parallel 8 channel Kit-74
1 6' Christmas tree
all the lights that i could spare from my house.
1 stereo system (was not part of the bet but I wanted to put this bet to bed)
When my fellow co-workers came to work that next morning they were pretty much blown away. I won the bet, and as a bonus I also won best holiday(Christmas, people, it's called CHRISTMAS!) decorated cube!
I then decided to take this very same system and adapted it my house that next day. And then i guess you can say "I Built it, and they came!"
Now I am using D-Light hardware second year with Aurora and I have lost count of how many lights I hang ever year. I have snow blowers broadcasting and way to much of an addiction.
anyways, I guess thats my "Hi"
Slink
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Coming soon www.computerizedlights.com |
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ChrisL1976
Beta Testers
Joined: 01 Sep 2008 Location: Kankakee, Ill Online Status: Offline Posts: 1341 |
Quote Reply
Posted: 04 Sep 2008 at 11:45am |
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Well since everyone else is doing it.
My names Chris Lazdins. I'm in Kankakee, Illinois. Been decorating for around 7-8 years. First it was just the balcony on our apartment, then we got the house 3 years ago and it got Larger. I can say Carson got me started in this. I saw the youtube clip and started looking into it and was more than shocked at how.....affordable....cough cough ...getting started was....(with 16 channels) I was figuring thousands of dollars. So I took the leap on November 1st of last year with D-light. Novemeber, I sequenced 6 songs, my wife almost divorced me, and was up and running the week after Thanksgiving with around 3k lights. I made it through the season, wife decided to stay after seeing how pretty the lights were, and I pounded the after Christmas Sales for this year. Just picked up 3 more controllers so I'm at 64 channels now which will controll the other 6k lights I got. Looking forward to this year which to say is coming so fast its scary......2 1/2 months till lights on..... Edited by ChrisL1976 - 04 Sep 2008 at 11:55am |
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Chris
www.lightsonsixth.com |
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bdkeen
Beta Testers
Joined: 31 Dec 2007 Location: Easton,PA Online Status: Offline Posts: 380 |
Quote Reply
Posted: 04 Sep 2008 at 1:11pm |
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May as well follow the crowd here and say Hi as well. I'm Bruce Keen and last year was the start of syncronized lighting for me. We live near Easton, PA and far as I know there's not anyone else nearby (say 25 mile radius) doing anything like this sort of stuff.
That darn little Mr. Christmas box that I saw at Lowes started it all. It did the job for 2007 but wasn't what I really wanted. Along comes D-light into my life. 2 controllers will be enought - yeah Right.. now at 112 channels and holding for 2008 the first year doing this.
Seems like now everytime I see something laying around I'm thinking how can I use it in the Christmas Display! - guess this might qualify me as 'bitten' Found out that some old stuff and some imagination really goes a long way.
Really looking foward to this year. Neighbors really liked that little Mr. Christmas, and I've warned them that there'll a large improvement this year and probably a substantial traffic increase - but they're all still looking forward to the display.
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LightsOnLogan
Admin Group
Joined: 11 Oct 2007 Online Status: Offline Posts: 3187 |
Quote Reply
Posted: 04 Sep 2008 at 2:33pm |
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I guess I should say hi on my own forum...
Michael Miller a.k.a. LightsOnLogan here. I am a software developer in Greenbrier, TN (north of Nashville).
My first venture into computerized lighting was in 1993 when I started tinkering with 8 relays tied to an LPT port... but I never actually finished the project or used it in a display. I always kept the idea in the back of my mind but never really found the time to do anything with it. About 5 years ago a fried gave me a DIO card he no longer had any use for and you can guess what the first thought was to enter my mind! Oh, but just on/off wasn't good enough; I needed dimming and ramps too! LOR looked pricey so I got a PIC programmer and started learning PIC assembly to go the DIY route. Somewhere in there D-Light appeared on the scene and I shelved the project because D-Light was at about the same price point I was targeting. The money wan't there to animate the display that year though, so for 2005 I was static with 8000 lights.
History tends to repeat itself, for in early 2006 I was writing my own software to control the lights because I didn't care for the LOR software and thought I could do much better. Then, along comes D-Light announcing Spectrum with almost everything I was looking for so that project was also shelved. 2006 was our first year computerized with 64 channels of ACx8 controllers and the Spectrum software. Of course, y'all know the history of Spectrum in 2006! It was full panic/meltdown time here and to save my show (and several others) a very primitive scheduler application was written to play back Spectrum files. Written in only 2 weeks, "Lights On Logan Player" was some of the worst code I've ever seen... but it got the job done and we made it through the year!
Around June 2007 I grabbed the lastest Spectrum release to check the progress on the bug fixes. Um... still didn't work. Time for plan B... clear the schedule of all other consulting projects because I'm going into the sequencer software business. This all stayed pretty quiet until last October when I invited a small handful of LOL Player users that I had email addresses for to become the earliest beta testers for the future Aurora product.
By December Spectrum was once again in total meltdown and the word got out that Aurora was in the works. We stabilized the beta as best as we could and 0.2 became the first public pre-order release. A few thousand hours of work later and here I am today!
By the way... doing software development consulting paid a lot better than Aurora does... but Aurora is certainly far more fun!
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peteandvanessa
Beta Testers
Joined: 11 Dec 2007 Location: Rocklin, CA Online Status: Offline Posts: 206 |
Quote Reply
Posted: 04 Sep 2008 at 2:57pm |
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Well I'll jump into. I'm here in Rocklin, California, a native English guy called Pete, who moved over to the US about 3 years ago with my Family.
One drunken 2006 XMAS eve myself and my friend were looking at the usual lighting videos on YouTube, then we thought urm, lets do that.
So we reviewed LOL and D-light and selected D-light, so in Jan 2007 we bought their S/W and controllers in Jan. Soon after that my father died suddenly of cancer, I didn't get time to fly back to the UK to see him before he went, so I vowed to put on a Halloween show.
Work most of the year on and off programming my Halloween sequences dedicated to my father.
Ran Halloween on Spectrum, but my friend who does the XMAS lights around the corner we found that Specturm was full of bugs and problems. So we dumped Spectrum and switched to Aurora (it was our saviour for XMAS 2007).
Got it all up and running and ran it for a whole month. So moving to this Halloween 2008 we have another controller to make it 48 channels and about 20,000 lights as well as a popup pneumatic monster (also controlled by Aurora).
Bit skint this year so didn't manage to add more controllers this year :-(
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breakbenj
Pre-Order User
Joined: 21 Dec 2007 Location: Georgia Online Status: Offline Posts: 102 |
Quote Reply
Posted: 04 Sep 2008 at 4:25pm |
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Hello, Jeff Weeks, I'm know as breakbenj in here (big fan of Breaking Benjamin) and I'm from Georgia.
This is my first year at computerized lights. I have had large static displays for years and decided last year that I needed a change, Started doing some research and ran across Aurora and decided to go with D-light for contollers without knowing that Aurora and D-light would end up working so closely together which makes me feel like I made the right decision on contollers and software.
so far I have been enjoying the design part and can't wait to see it become reality.
Thanks to the Aurora team and everyone who has answered all my questions up to this point.
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Jeff
 
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deweycooter
Development
Joined: 14 Oct 2007 Location: League City, TX Online Status: Offline Posts: 674 |
Quote Reply
Posted: 04 Sep 2008 at 5:33pm |
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Steve Jones - this will be my 3rd year. Saw Carson's display in Dec 2005, knew it was too late to do anything on my own, but vowed to make it happen in 2006 as my next nerdly endeavor. Ordered 64 channels worth of ACx8 silvers, honed the soldering skills and got it all put together. Ordered Spectrum as soon as it came out. I was able to get my songs sequenced, but was frustrated with the scheduler. I believe that M-Class had mentioned on PlanetChristmas that he had written his own scheduler - I was immediately intrigued and PM'd him about it. He shared the app and it was a life saver! I was even lucky enough to get to submit some code changes that optimized the sequences by removing redundant commands (a certain part of me hopes that some of that is still in Aurora...
 ).I kind of hung it up after Christmas, but in the fall of 2007 I sent Michael an email out of the blue, just asking him what's up, if he's seen the latest version of Spectrum...low and behold, he had been busy. So I jumped in as a beta tester. I added 16 channels and a few more songs - all in Aurora. Even then, it was pretty stable, and I purchased it as soon as it was available. I've been pretty quiet for the past 6 months (busy with s/w development consulting), but it's getting to be that time that I need to MAKE time. Hopefully I'll get my neighbors more involved (I synchronized 3 houses the first year, 4 last year, prolly somewhere between 6 and 8 this year  ).Hoping to do some neat stuff this year, but still have a lot of decisions up in the air. |
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