The lights got started before Thanksgiving this year – while waiting for a turkey to smoke – but a few weeks of sub-freezing temperatures stalled things because 15 degrees is just too cold to be outside putting up lights.
I had hoped to build something new for this year, but didn’t get started early enough, so the display is mostly the same as last years. I did two upgrades to the tree lights from last year.
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The animation which had worked fine in inside temperatures didn’t work at freezing temps. The processor runs a bit slower at those temps, and it was just enough different to mess up some of the timing loops. That was a simple change.
The second change was to deal with the lack of light. The 2008 version used 7 watt colored lights inside of colored bulbs, and not only was there not enough light, the amount of light differed depending on the color. The 2009 version uses 25 watt and 40 watt lights, so it puts out a bunch more light (about 400 watts total instead of about 100 watts), and the animation works correctly.
I also had to fix ring of fire, which had taken on about a TBSP of water into the circuitry, which made it unhappy. After about 3 hours of troubleshooting showed me that the decoupling capacitor had shorted due to the moisture and was causing a whole bunch of problems.
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So, you’ll need to be content with the write-up from last year, which has a few pictures. I did do a few new pictures. Here’s a picture of the old tree lights:
and here’s the new version (sorry that there’s no snow…)
Full gallery here.
So, what do you think ?