As the installation process ramps up we are very happy to show off some of our tuppetstars. These RGB stars can be pretty much any colour - we set up a few as a demo: Meanwhile the rest of our light show is slowly emerging from boxes for another year.
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Yesterday I mounted a piece of strip light along the roofline. I cabletied the lights to 10mm Aluminium strip and sat the strip on the nails which held up the rope light last year. On half of the strip I also attached 6mm coro as a diffuser. The vote here is divided on whether the lights look better with or without the coro. Surprisingly Mothertuppet likes the brighter uncovered lights, while Justin thinks they could be a bit much en masse so he voted for the coro. Tuppet quite likes the coro because it is a bit more forgiving on the straightness of the lights underneath, but at the same time it is an extra bit of work and it is more obvious during the day time, so her vote is as yet undecided.
An alternative mounting method I found during my testing (it was hard to get the 2m strip over all of the hooks while on my own up a ladder) was to lay the aluminium over the nails with the strip and coro on top. The sandwich meant that the lights were very straight while the fact you could only see the side of the lights reduced the intensity and light reflections. One quirk though... somehow Red and Green are swapped somewhere, so when you tell the lights to be red they turn on green. Small wiring issue to be corrected! The five wiring boxes are now complete, or they would be if we hadn't managed to loose two of the 400W power supplies (the big greenish grey boxes). Each box has external connection ports for cat5 (carrying DMX) and a caravan plug so that power can be connected using a regular extension cord. In these pictures you can see the new smaller controllers we have from Ray Wu, a very popular Chinese supplier through Alibaba.com (with the blue labels). So far these are wonderful. 24 Outputs (the much larger green ones in the left picture are only 16!), 24 Volts, and channels are set with dials so you always know exactly what is set and you can change things very easily while the unit is on the network - simply power down and start again.
You can also see that the boxes look nice and tidy until the tail connectors are attached to the controllers. We will have some more cable management installed before the boxes go up so it will all be nice and tidy! With a new collection of controllers and lights arriving we need some new boxes to mount everything in at Christmas, so Tuppetsdad has been busy playing with his dovetail jig.
We now have 5 big boxes to put everything in at Christmas - nice and tidy, reasonably waterproof (the boxes will be under the eaves so waterproof is not a big issue) and made to fit the house. The boxes are now getting a coat of paint to match the house before they are mounted in preparation for Christmas - just 7 weeks to go! |
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September 2021
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