Christmas and home automation

[collegeboyslive]

Christmas is coming and this means a chance to do an awesome lighting display.

what controllers have you used in the past , what scripts and how well did it turn out?

I would like to start planning now but i think i need soemthing a little better than an ocelot or x10 switches to make a great display.

ideas and sugestions please

[zoomkat]

The below links have some good info on controlling christmas lights for the DIY types. The bottom link has how to make a gizmo to attach to the parallel port to individually control 320 strings of lights from the parallel port. A serial or USB I/O device probably could easily replace the parallel port.

http://computerchristmas.com/index.p...rchristmas.com
http://computerchristmas.com/index.p...d=4&LowLimit=0

[collegeboyslive]

I was more hopeing for off the shelth stuff, I could make this but i dont have the time

[LeeIII]

After following some of the links, I ran across this which might be useful:

http://www.planetchristmas.com/2004/Inventory.htm

[johnwpb]

Automated Christmas Lights

I think this is something like you are looking for. Totally plug an play, add 16 sets of lights and either a built in pre-programmed display, or design your own. a BIT on the pricey side for sure, but the effect I think would be worth it. (I think that goes for just about anything with to do with HA

http://www.animatedlighting.com/products/lcpro.asp

This site also has some fantastic lighting. Chasing rop lights in multicolor ect. Available up to 150ft sections! Also Rop light controllers to sync many strands of lights with 6 functions, and audio control.
http://www.christmaslights.biz/

and one last one that has a lot of varieties of hardware to control lights from your computer. Prices seem better than the first link for sure
http://store.lightorama.com/showtime-products.html

[Rupp]

CBL,
Don't sell Homeseer or the available technology too short. Remember it's not all X10 modules anymore. I'll bet you can mimic any of these controllers easily with HS and 10 -12 Z-wave appliance modules. It only take less than a second to send and act on a command so you could do some fairly elaborate lighting scenes with this setup.

[thutchins]

CBL,
Since you mention Ocelot, thought I'd throw this in (even though it's not done by HS:-0). I have a Leopard and use CMAX / X10 to run my display. Should be able to do close to the same w/ HS - I could never get the timing right and it tied up HS too much for my taste.

Anyway, my lights outside are set up as 4 groups of solid colored C9 lights plugged into lamp mods, each color given it's own housecode/ unitcode. I then string the lights such that they alternate colors (blue, green, yelow, red) and use a timer that changes the look every 30 seconds - sometimes all one color, sometimes 2 colors, 3 etc. There's a huge variety that you can come up with using your imagination. The coolest thing is that I have them fade on off. Do the same thing for the xmas tree inside. Guests sit and stare at it for hours cause it constantly changes.

Also have reindeer, trees, Santa / sleigh etc in all white that stays on.

All together close to 5000 lights outside mostly mini lights(but doesn't get overwhelming since they are rarely all on at the same time).

I set up a simple xmas flag that is set on Thanksgiving day and cleared on Jan 6. (keeps me from having to redo the programming every year) Then the outside lights come on at dusk, off at 11pm (except of course xmas eve, stays on all night for Santa) on at 5am and off at 9am.

Inside stuff turns on before the kids get home from school off at 11 on at 5:30am and off at 9am except on weekends and during xmas break from school (set via another flag) when they stay on all day.

Needless to say I get a crowd every year stopping by to watch (neighbors don't mind too much - it provdes a landmark for giving directions :-))
And of course we do get a Thankyou card from the electric co. every year :-o

If you want faster results I'm sure you could use a simple setup with the ADI Secu16 using relays although you'd loose the fade on / off. But you would lessen the traffic on the X10 bus. When the lights are on we do notice the occassional response delay, although it's less than a second and so not bad.

Sorry for the long post but this has been a hobby for 8 years and keeps getting bigger / better (at least to me!) every year!!

thutch

[johnwpb]

So, did you settle on something?

CollegeBoysLive: Did you come up with something? If so I am currious as to what you are implementing.

I like one Idea I read somewhere. He put lights around the roof, trees ect, just like we all do. BUT he ran 4 strands of lights together. Each strand was a different color. Controlling them from his PC, he was able to change the color of ALL the lighting, and cycle through the different colors.

[Jim Doolittle]

I am not so much into elaborate outdoor lighting. Don't mind getting on the roof but I think my roof doesn't like it .

I had posted in the past about controlling the lighting of a Christmas Village. I even posted a script that did random light changes throughout the village. Never seemed to have enough lamp/appliance modules to do what I wanted since we keep adding buildings and I keep using modules for things that use them for the entire year.

I really would like individual control. We now have 16 buildings which means I would use an entire house code which is no problem but I only have four X10 modules to spare unless I go around and borrow some but I don't want to end up having to put all that back when Christmas is over.

The Christmas Village does have a church that happened to have a speaker with a 1/8" mini-plug. So, my daughter and I loaded her MP3 player with Christmas music including such time-honored favorties such as "Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer" and "Chupmunks Roasting on an Open Fire" (also found interesting parody songs such as "Another D*ck in the Mall" but excluded that from the church). Sure would be fun to have HS play "Silent Night" in the church and then the village lights fade to Off. Wait a minute ... I can do that now with just one lamp module ...

[Rupp]

Jim,
Martin has 8 lamp modules on sale for $37.99.
http://www.automatedoutlet.com/home.php

[Jim Doolittle]

Jim,
Martin has 8 lamp modules on sale for $37.99.
http://www.automatedoutlet.com/home.php

Rupp,

I saw those and they are appliance modules. It would get quite irritating to hear 16 appliance modules clicking on and off.

I am tempted to build an X10 device with 16 outlets that you assign a housecode and control accordingly but am not sure where to start.

[Rupp]

I wonder if he would substitute lamp modules for the appliance modules?

[Jim Doolittle]

I should have asked when I ordered the switch for my workshop. I ended up ordering two lamp modules with that order but they are the better ones that I want to swap for ones in a problem area of my house.

[johnwpb]

The 16 Appliances Modules of Christmas.....

Jim Doolittle It would get quite irritating to hear 16 appliance modules clicking on and off.

You could time it when The Little Drummer boy was playing through the Church! Hahahahah I Couldn't resist!

X10 has 3 SMART Lamp modules on sale for $32. THese soft start, and remember the dim setting, so when turned back on , it will ramp up to the last dim setting. They are also 2 way. I just picked up 6 of em.
They are located here.

[huggy591]

johnwpb, I'm the guy with the 4 stands on the outline of the roof. I was running it with a PC using the parallel port. I made a temporary subpanel consisting of a circuit breaker box and a set of 10 quad-outlet boxes, each with an SSR inside feeding the outlets and low voltage control leads coming out to header for a parallel port cable.

I have a 60 amp feed from my main panel to this subpanel. In the subpanel I have 10 10-amp breakers. Each feeds a quad box SSR, which is also rated at 10 amps.

The parallel cable plugs into a Windows PC, and runs a program I wrote in VB that cycles the various parallel lines on/off semi-randomly, changing speeds, and never letting the roof to go dark. I plug a single-colored set of strings into an outlet box, and then let the program cycle them on off in random combinations. There's a video on my web site that briefly shows them in action the first year (2002): http://gac.no-ip.com/gordon/Xmas2002-256_wmv.htm I used four colors (red, blue, green, violet), about 8 strings total, I think.

You could use this same method to make things appear to move, turning on/off certain lights in specific sequence. Buying those strings with controllers and hooking them up to your own controller allows you to do your own thing, too.

There are all kinds of ideas and products out there. Check out www.planetchristmas.com and the links from there.