Santapaws has posted some video of his animated "dueling snowmen" display. Custom home-built animated light displays are so much cooler than store-bought ones.
Multimedia development, game programming, immersive environments, and Halloween.
Tuesday, November 29, 2005
Dueling Snowmen
Santapaws has posted some video of his animated "dueling snowmen" display. Custom home-built animated light displays are so much cooler than store-bought ones.
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SantaPaws (AKA DeathTouch) is using a controller from AnimatedLighting (the same place where I got my LED lights). The controller is pretty cool and you can do a whole bunch of stuff with it. It is a little pricey, but maybe you and I can go halfers on it and you can use it for Halloween and I will use it for christmas. Check it out: http://www.animatedlighting.com
I talked to my neighbor (Brad) and he and I are thinking about setting up the SnowMan fight display between our two yards for next year....
Cool....
You might also want to check out http://www.lightorama.com/ and http://www.d-light.us/ I have not heard of d light, but lightorama I heard is cheaper than animatedlighting. Many people I have talked to said they liked Lightorama. You might want to check them out before animatedlighting. But, I do like Animated Lighting's controls. They take the cool and rain really good. I went with AnimatedLighting because of Greg Parcel. You can see his stuff on http://www.twasthenightbefore.com/
Well, frankly, I don't think animated light ropes and stuff is in keeping with the look we're going for on Halloween, but I think it might be something we could investigate for the Fourth of July float...
I don't know about that CC, but I used it in my Halloween stuff as well. I placed it in the roof of my crypt this year. It was a big hit. It would slowly dim all the lights on the crypt and in the yard. The first year I had it, it would flash all the lights to all the Halloween songs, and all of it was in sync with the music. And don't call me Frankly. LOL. Man, you walked into that one. LOL.
http://i7.photobucket.com/albums/y260/lovermonkey/DSC01639.jpg
Ok, CC. I have an example you can relate to. Here is my Halloween video for this year. If you have real player or somthing that can play it. Watch the crypt's lights and the lights around it.
https://home.comcast.net/~sloatbyte/halloweenx.rm
Yeah, I had actually looked at your lights earlier, but I didn't realize this was the same product. Not bad!
One problem, of course, is that I'm really limited on what kind of lighting I can do for Halloween. We have that huge damn streetlight in front of our house that douses everything in light. That's fine 364 days out of the year, but on Halloween, it sucks.
But something like this might come in handy if we ever move stuff into the back yard, or maybe we could use it as a sequencer for the black light puppet show...
My wife and I thought that about the snowman display. It is right in front of a large street lamp. But after putting the snowmen display up, it doesn't look as bad as we thought. You might want to put a few lights over there just to see if it might work. It not, just pay some kid to hit the lamp with a rock. LOL. Merry christmas CC and family.
I was wondering if we could use the AL controller to operate not just lights, but animatronic things such as Pirate Skeletons? Could the controller be used to "hit" a pneumatic controller to make the Pirate dance or jiggle according to the sequencer program?
Enquiring minds want to know?
If you wanted to trigger a 120v relay, I don't see why not. They do have another board that can do all that. It is more for servos and solenoids. Of course there are cheaper ways to do that. Like kit74. Look it up on the web. Scary terry makes a good servo control for talking skulls. I have one of those. You just hook your cd player up to it to make your skull talk. It is nice. Zombie-f has one. http://www.unpleasantstreet.com/index.php?x=/videos/2005&y=talking_skeletons
We actually had some bad luck with the Scary Terry drivers this year. We bought some skulls with those drivers through Cowlacious, and we never could get them to work satisfactorily. Our "talking pirate skulls" never did work properly, and what working they were doing had ceased halfway through the night. We only need them to work for one night, but not even that...
I bought mine this year too and they didn't work either. I think there was screw up on the shematic or part. I don't remember which. But after I did the mod it worked great. Have not had a problem since. You might want to shoot terry an email asking about that.
Gee CC, the way we are going you need to start your own Nephilim forum. LOL.
Mod? What mod? Dang, sounds like I missed an update somewhere that would have made our pirate skulls go smoother this year....
Hey CC, I found the addendum email about the servo driver. The problem is that it is a link to his site, which seems to be down. You might want to ask him about it. I guess there is a jumper that needs to be placed on the board. Here is the email I got from him a while ago. I hope it helps. Sorry, it took so long. I forgot which computer I had the email on.
I have attached an addendum sheet for the Scary Terry Manual. It shows where a jumper must be placed to get sound out to the speakers if the unit is not using the ISD chip. The attachment is a PDF document. If you don’t have a PDF reader, get it free from here:
www.adobe.com
If your email system strips away attachments, then you can also download the addendum or the full updated manual at:
http://www.cowlacious.com/Cowlacious%20Product%20Support.htm
Thanks,
Carl Cowley
support@cowlacious.com
www.cowlacious.com
Hauntingly Good Electronic Products!
Toll free within the USA 1-866-201-0760
This post is 13 comments long and I didn't want it to end so I thought I would just keep it going.....
So, how's it going?
LOL!
Well, I *did* end up using a jumper in our skulls, so maybe we already have the fix. But I'll check it out.
The problem we had was not being able to calibrate the stupid things so that we got good performance. We'd get it to a reasonable state, but by the time we took it out to the yard, it would have somehow uncalibrated itself and stopped working. We'd take it back inside and tweak it again, and take it out, and it would stop working. Maybe it was totally killing the battery, but we really weren't driving it for very long.
Our plan is to hook it up with a real power supply for next year. Hopefully, that will fix the issues we had.
Hey,
I have all the extension cords that you will need for the external power supply.
(also, I wanted to keep the thread running.....16 and counting...wooohooo!)
-daniel
You can also find christmas decorating supplies at edecorsource.com or at Brady and Artists.
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