Christmas lights / 2000

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Welcome to the information and pictures for the 757.org year 2000 Christmas lights. The year 2000 boasted a large improvement from the 1999 Internet connected Christmas lights. Big differences included the fact that we actually had broadband internet connections on site. On top of this, the number of individual circuits in the yard increased heavily. The big tree remained the same from 1999. There was 6 strings of 150 lights per color. 6 colors. That is 900 lights of each color, or 5400 lights total. It used the same 6 triac driver card as the previous year. The main difference was the bushes. In 1999 each bush was decorated with a circuit of multi-colored lights, and a circuit of clear lights. This means in 1999 the visitor could choose Clear, colored, or clear and colored. In 2000 we made custom printed boards and gave each bush 4 separate colors. Red, Green, Blue and Clear. This means that at minimum, a bush now has 100 of blue, 100 of green, 100 of red and 150 of clear lights. Many of the bushes required several sets of each to fully decorate them out. Click on images to view a larger version. Use the BACK button in your web browser to return. I believe this was most of the lights all turned on at once The tree after being decorated. All colors + clear on Tree was most likely pink and gold, or gold. Bushes were cycling thru colors. Green tree with bushes cycling red and blue Blue bushes and red or pink tree Technical stuff In the year 2000, we no longer relied on the Sealevel DIO-32B 32 output ISA Cards. This year a homebrew card was slapped together using a JDR breadboard. It consisted of 3 Intel 8255 PPI chips. Each chip is capable of 24 TTL outputs. These outputs were fed into a patch panel, which in turn fed the controller circuits on each bush and in the tree. The Sealevel card wasn't bad, but it was relay based. In this application we really didn't need that kind of isolation. We etched 10 circuit boards which each contained 4 TRIACs to switch the 110 volts AC into the Christmas lights. The TRIACs were grossly overrated. They were capable of handling 6 amps per TRIAC. Because of this, there was no need to heatsink them. Each card also contained a 74LS08 chip that buffered the 5 volt TTL signals from the computer. The computer was a FreeBSD loaded PC with the custom ISA card. Since we finally had broadband early 2000, we also used two Indys to serve webcams. The cameras were generic crap picked up from local thrift stores for $5 each. If the cameras failed or were stolen, it wasn't a huge deal. Also in the rack was a patch panel with cat5 cable going into the yard. Each cable to each bush carried 5 volts for the 74LS08 IC, 4 signal lines and ground. The tree connection had 6 data lines, 5 volts, and ground. The controller circuit. The one at the top is the 1999 model. The two below are front and back of the all new year 2000 model. Picture of the decorating "fun." It looked neat, like the tree was bleeding color. Chris and Jason during decoration phase. Ethan, Matt and Brian assembling circuit boards. Another picture of the decoration of the tree. Hardware rack that ran the show. low-end Pentium PC, network switch, two SGI Indys (bottom), and the patch panel feeding the yard. The notebook was for configuration of the Indys via serial port. Jason hard at work configuring the web server. Console view monitoring the webcam systems in the garage. You won't find these at CompUSA! This is the ISA breadboard that contains the circuitry to drive the light controllers. The Future Most likely this will be the last year for a good while that the setup will be put online. It is a great deal of work getting everything up and running. It is a pain putting up the lights on the tree (you have to decorate it 6 times over!). Maybe in the future we will do it again. Credits Ken wrote most of the software. Brian, Matt, and Ethan worked on Circuit boards. Jason, Chris, Ethan, and Matt actually hung the lights.