| 2004 Lights |
| October 29: I received a job transfer to Colorado Springs. I'll be moving around Thanksgiving weekend, so what lights I do put up will be rather late this season. I was shooting for 20,000 lights on 112 computer-controlled channels but that is now on hold. I will have some lights up, so check back later. Once I've found a house to rent, I'll update this page. |
| December 16: The display is complete! I ended up with 12,429 lights in the display, which isn't bad for not being able to start until December! I'm using 10 channels for the "supertree" in front of the window, and 6 channels for the large tree in the front yard. The supertree has 4 channels of multicolor lights and 4 channels of white, plus a star on top and a cross hidden inside the tree. The large tree in the front yard has 4,440 lights split into 6 colors (each color on its own channel). The light controllers are 2 8-outlet powerstrips modified to run each outlet on a separate channel. I used Peter Olsen's 74HC595 shift-register design as a starting point. On to the pictures (click a thumbnail for a larger image) |
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| "Supertree" |
| Mini-trees |
| Luminarias and Candy-Cane Fence |
| Panorama (5 images merged together) |
| December 19th: A short circuit in one of the light controllers fried the IO's on the computer's motherboard. The lights are still on, but I lost animation for this year. The large tree will be cut down to 2220 lights to keep from overloading the circuit. |
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| Mini-trees (snow) |
| Buried lights (snow) |
| Click on a picture for a larger image |