| - Behind the Scenes 2008 - |
| Click image for hi-res photo |
| In order to get dimensions for designing the "strobe blobs", I marked off one inch increments on a piece of tube with electrical tape and hauled it up to the top with a string that I tossed over. I then took a photo from my roof to minimize parallax errors. Once I had the dimensions, I made a mock-up of the streetlight in my backyard. This was important for fitting the strobes, but more importantly for testing the removal process. We only rent the lift to put stuff UP. Everything must be designed to come down without the need for the lift. When we installed the strobes on the real street lights, everything fit and we successfully tested the removal process. |
| Assembling street light strobes |
| Assembling street light strobes |
| Finished street light strobes |
| Installation complete on Andy's street light. It rained on lift day. |
| Note how the left side is thinner than the right. We accidentally used 100 bulb strings meant for the street lights on the left half. We had to unwrap and redo this one. |
| Arch sequence testing. |
| Wes checking to make sure the right lights are plugged in the right channels. |
| Testing PCB's in Sunnyvale |
| A wet Ray helping with Andy's street light. |
| Daughter's PCB soldering station at her apartment in Long Beach. |
| Once again, I am mocked for my need for magnification. |
| Seven new LOR controller kits |
| New epoxy floor in the garage a month later. Getting ready for the Tesla. |
| Andy running lights on the Mega Tree frame. |
| Wrapping the "Rear Tree". Someday I should figure out what this tree is..... |
| LED delivery/inventory. Six boxes packed to the brim with lights. |
| Street Light Strobes |
| Rock Candy Arches |
| View of wrapping density, and a close up of what 5mm concave LEDs look like. |
| August. A round of golf, and then work on Xmas lights. |
| Building LOR Controllers |
| Misc. |
| Playing with LEDs |
| Left They didn't have the lift size that we ordered, so we got an "upgrade". This thing was HUGE. That's Andy somewhere up there topping off his birch trees. |
| Screen shot of the LOR Power Utility. LOR II data files are now in XML format. This means that we can now manipulate the data. Another Xmas light guy on our web forum created this macro that lets us enter in the max watts that each channel uses, and then it charts the power usage for a song in 0.1 second increments. This is very useful for determining if there are any points in the song where you might be overloading the controller. It also lets you calculate exactly how much electricity each song uses. We used this to make sure that each of our 2008 songs uses less electricity than in 2007. |
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