| 2002 Lights |
| This was my first year at attempting any kind of light control. In past years, I had only put lights up on the eaves of the house. This year I put up strands of white lights and multicolored lights and built a circuit to alternate between the two. I was planning on using more individual colors, but did not have the money for the parts (mainly SSR's). I used over 2500 lights on the outside of my house and saved 300 for the tree inside. The picture of the house is very low quality, as it is from a webcam hooked up to my laptop computer. |
 |
| This is the control panel inside the garage. I purchased a digital camera in 2003 and still had this stuff set up, otherwise there wouldn't be a picture of it. |
 |
 |
| Here's my circuit. It's a simple decade counter driven by a 555 timer. The terminal connectors on the right bring in +5V and +12V from a computer power supply. The red and black wires at the top left go to a potentiometer to control the speed. I built a decade counter so I could have up to 10 strings of lights turn on in sequence. The 7432 (OR gate) chip was added to reduce the number of outputs and buffer the output for the relay, connected to the orange and black wires on the right. I don't have any experience making PCB's yet, so that's what the other wires are for. |