COMPUTER CONTROL

So now that you have admitted that you have the lighting bug, and the neighbours call you Clarke Griswald at Christmas because you go all out with your display. It’s time to read on and take the next step with your hobby.

Imagine being able to control exactly when lights turn on and off in your yard.  It's actually pretty easy to do if you have a computer. Think what you could do if there were eight or more separate circuits that the computer could control. 

If you had eight reindeer across the front of your yard, each one could come on in sequence giving the illusion it is moving.  Then all the reindeer could flash at the same time. Imagine decorating one big tree with four stripes of vertical lights and four stripes of horizontal lights.  If you used the computer to start chasing the strings of lights, you could make that tree look like it was moving up and down or back and forth. 

The really exciting thing is when it comes to computerizing your lights is your imagination is where it all starts.  You need some hardware to interface between the low voltage inside of the computer and the high voltage required for a string of Christmas lights. With the hardware in place, you need our software to make it do what you want.

Computer controlling your display with our products isn’t as expensive as you might think.  The lighting controllers come packaged to handle eight channels and you can put as many lights as you want on a channel up to the current limit of the controller.  Computerizing your display is simple in concept but complicated in execution.  There's still the challenge of connecting everything to the computer and mastering how to tell the computer the way you want the lights to blink.

Synchronizing the lights to music isn't too hard to understand.  You can imagine a large grid where the x-axis (left to right) represents points in time and the y-axis (up and down) represents different lighting channels.  Each square in the grid represents a channel at a specific time.  In that square you tell the computer what you want the light channel to do. A typical song is three minutes long or 180 seconds.  If you wanted something to happen every ten seconds, there would be 18 points in time (180/10) to control. 

The problem with computerized Christmas lights is once you get started with a few channels, you can't stop.  There are many hobbyists out there with over 500 lighting channels.  Using the above example of a three minute song, you end up with (18x500=) 9,000 different places to control the lights.  In some songs lights will be changing a lot more often than every 10 seconds, perhaps on each beat.  Soon you fall into a black hole of time.  I've been there.  Don't forget you need to synchronize multiple tunes so you have an entire show.

Are there any rules of thumb for the time required to synchronize lights to music?  Nope.  For eight light channels it might average an hour of your time for each minute of song length.  For 500 light channels it could average a couple of days for each minute of song length... or not.  It has a lot to do with how good you are with computers and if you have a musical background. So... to get back to the most important thing to know: a computer is still running your display.  The real trick is to order a small system from us right now... just 8-16 light control channels. 

Set up a dedicated workspace for your new project in the comfort of your home.  Hook the controllers to the computer and plug a set of mini-lights into each light controller channel.  Take the time to learn the fundamental concepts of our software.  When you can make those strings of lights dance, you're ready to create a display for outdoors.  You know what to do when something goes wrong and not go into a panic, just give us a call we will be more than happy to help you on your way. Best of all it’s all 100% Australian built and designed. Now that’s TRUE BLUE.