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While last year’s triangle tree worked out fairly well, it was definitely a last-minute design.  12 feet tall and containing 16 x 42 node strings, it was fun to watch for the last couple weeks in December.

But there’s always room for improvement.

This time, we decided to start earlier in the year, in order to end up with something extra special.

During October’s indoor tree demo, we confirmed that 48 full strings of light added about 100 pounds of weight.  At that trim height, the wiring represents a substantial load & leverage force.  So based on Walter & Jackie Monkhouse’s detailed plans I build a rebar-reinforced concrete base weighing 120 pounds.  This was fitted with sturdy eyebolts as designed, then securely  anchored in the ground with a quartet of 3/4″ concrete stakes 36″ long.

On top of the base I added a two-part pole assembly based on 10′ sections of 2″ and 1.5″ rigid EMT conduit.  From the friendly folks at christmaslightshow.com I procured a 24″ star frame, a megatree hook set and a pully head.  From Lowes I bought, then installed, a geared winch on the pole.  This way the main tree assembly could move up and down for repairs, testing and potential bad weather.

Then, because of the recent 102 mph windstorm not far from our home, I added three external guy wires made of 3/16″ wire rope (rated at 800 pounds minimum breaking strength).  These attached to the top of the 2″ pipe, then anchored in the ground with more 36″ stakes, heavy turnbuckles and a handful of shackles.

The entire post assembly (20′ of pipe, less 2′ of overlap, plus about 2.5′ of star) was assembled on the ground, then tilted into place and anchored securely.

Using a 10′ A-frame ladder, I attached three StellaGreen strings to each of the hook head’s 16 angle brackets.  At this time, the pully head was resting at the top of the 2″ pipe section.  Had I used 1.5″ and 1.0″ pipe for the entire assembly, the hook head would have moved freely to the ground.  However, the sturdiness of the thicker pipe is reassurring.

Once the foundation was set and stable, the hook head was cranked up to full working height.

Finally, I built a base ring from 60′ of 1/2″ PCV pipe, joined together with simple sleeve fittings.  The string spacing at the base of the tree is about 15″ on center, and it’s a nice balance.  Our StellaGreen strings contain 85 RGB nodes on 10 cm (3.93700787 inch) spacing, plus an 2.5 meter pigtail at the beginning for convenient connection to a controller.  Thus, the strings offer more or less 28′ of light to work with.  In this installation, I didn’t want our home or the neighbor’s home to be damaged if the tree somehow tipped over.  So the tree is a bit shorter than it could be, per Mr. Pythagoras and some catenary sagging.  There’s about 3′ of node string at the base of the tree, arranged in a neat inverted sunburst pattern.

The tree is driven by a trio of E16-II Ethernet controllers.  Total power draw is around 800 watts peak.  85 nodes per string x 3 channels per node x 48 strings equals 4,080 nodes and 12,240 total control channels.  With a 44 Hz refresh rate across the entire system, color fades are as smooth as silk.

Neighbors say that at night, when they enter the neighborhood from 1/4 mile away, the top section of the tree peeks through the other houses like an iridescent spaceship.

Hoping to post some video clips in a day or so.  Click any of these photos above to enlarge.

John

This one can be considered RoadieProof.

XLR-4 outputs for each string.  Neutrik PowerCon for AC in & through (great for daisy chaining, as each chassis only draws about 400 watts at peak power).  Neutrik EtherCon for data input.  Durable polycarbonate enclosure.  International power supply for worldwide operation.

Will also ship with an optional ‘truss kit’ for easy and safe flying.

Coming soon to a tour near you.

Thanks to Mountain View Staging for the power & data cable, LED uplights and other infrastructure bits.

Six StellaGreen strings driven by last year’s E16-I controllers.  Assorted pneumatic odds and ends.

We have such a fun neighborhood.  The Haunted Creature Crate worried many kids, and more then a few of their parents.

The box is actually a genuine shipping crate which came to New York City from Europe, packed full of crystal chandelier.  It somehow ended up empty in Utah much later, and I grabbed it from a seller on craigslist.

23' RGB Megatree, in blue and white.

Happy Friday!

Fall is finally here.  Love this season.

A lighting designer here in town was considering a giant Christmas tree as part of a December production.  So very late last night, we hauled some gear over to his rehearsal space and set up a demo system.

The twenty three foot tall tree (it could be more, but we ran out of flying space) is based 48 StellaGreen RGB strings and 3 of our new E16-II node controllers.

Complete control over the tree requires 24 universes of DMX data.  That’s more than twelve thousand control channels. However, since we left ‘practical’ behind several years ago, this is not a problem at all. Frame rate is 44 Hz.

More details about the green strings and controller will be posted very shortly.  For now, though, here’s some stills and video from the evening:

Note: I wish I’d remembered to take a photo with a person standing next to tree, just to give some sense of scale.  This tree is enormous.  And beautiful.  For rev2, the base will be bigger and the strings held with more tension.  In theory, the result will look a bit less like the famous Sorting Hat.

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Thanks!

This handy board (16 StellaGreen strings, each 85 nodes long) will be used to test each and every E16-2 controller shipped out this season.  Shown are 4,080 control channels, and about 48.0 amps DC at full power.  44 Hz refresh rate is fully supported.

E16-2 is available with E1.31 (streaming ACN) or Art-Net 2 firmware.

Here’s something fun we’ve been working on lately:

Yclept ‘StellaSparks’, each contains 3 super-bright white LEDs inside a waterproof chassis.  Super bright!  Here’s a clip of them running.  The tree is decorated with 6 of our ‘StellaGreen’ RGB node strings (85 nodes per string) and a set of StellaSparks (30 strobes on 1′ centers, plus an 8′ leader).

Strobe pricing is $135 for a 38′ string.  These can be directly controlled by our E16, E16-2 or E4 controllers.  Preorder now, or wait for off-the-shelf shipments the shelf in 4 weeks.

Engineering Solutions was pleased to provide ~8,000 RGB nodes and 12 E16 controllers (plus an appropriate stack of spare parts) to Ricky Martin’s 2011 tour.  We worked closely with Illinois-based Upstaging, who provided the larger lighting rig, and ShowFX in Los Angeles, who fabricated the scenic pieces on which the nodes were installed.

John travelled to LA to assist with patching and configuring the nodes and controllers.  On tour, the nodes would be controlled by a Hippo Critter pixel mapping engine, so a demo Hippo was set up in the shop for testing.  The lighting network was designed so that the Hippo sent data over a dedicated fiberoptic cable to the stage, where it was converted back to copper to feed the 12 E16s.  Somewhere between 36 and 44 universes of DMX are used to drive all the nodes.  The remainder of the lighting rig was controlled with other equipment, and on an isolated network.

The E16′s web-based configuration tool made it very easy to assign each node string to its proper address, based on the paperwork generated by the Bryan, the Hippo programmer.

As an interesting side-note, an Art-Net testing suite called ‘DMX Workshop’ has been published by Artistic License.  Free to use, it contains utilities for sending and receiving Art-Net data on any channel of any universe.  At one point during system testing, the entire pixel map was acting rough and choppy.  The frame rate was slow (way, way less than our regular 44 Hz throughput) and it didn’t look good at all.

So to test whether the problem was related to the Hippo, the E16s, or something in the middle, we disconnected the Hippo, plugged in a Windows laptop, and ran a ‘bandwidth test’ utility against the E16s.

We were able to totally load up the network by enabling universes 1 – 44.  Then we sent an ‘r g b’ walking pattern to the entire system.  That is, each node of each string was in red, then green, then blue.  The test started at a 1 Hz refresh rate.

At this speed, we couldn’t see any delay between nodes or strings.  All of the set pieces were changing color in exact synchrony.  This proved that the issue laid neither with the E16s nor the network switch.

Just for fun, we sped up the chase to 44 Hz and set it to ‘strobe’ (black white black repeating).

The many thousand RGB LEDs chased in unison with our throbbing eyeballs.

This high-speed test was promptly discontinued.

After a quick phone call to Hippo tech support, the jitter problem was traced to an errant setting in the software.

Most of the photos below were taken at the scenery shop.  However, the one of the top left was snapped during production rehearsals in Puerto Rico at the end of March.  Click any photo to enlarge.

Starting at 0:35, this video clip shows the nodes displaying content.  There’s other interesting looks at 5:00 and later.

Stay tuned for an upcoming post describing the ‘Tour Hardened’ E16 Controller and node string system we’ll be offering in a month or so.  We’ve added features specifically designed to make the system strong and road-worthy.  Bless their hearts, roadies can be rough on gear.  You’ll see that we’ve eliminated every potential ‘pinch point’ in the new hardware release.

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Just fooling around with cheesy transitions in the video editing program.  At any rate, the New Year’s Eve guests thought the tree was fun, even though (especially since?) the patterns displayed weren’t as subdued as what played throughout the Christmas season.

On a happy note, the waterproof E16 chassis withstood a week of nearly continuous rain, snow, warm and freezing weather between Christmas and New Year’s Eve.

Thanks, everyone, for your support and comments throughout the year.  It’s been a wild ride for sure.

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Late last night my amazing wife returned from delivering Christmas goodies to the neighbors.  She held out the five fingers on her right hand and asked, “Do you know what this is?”

Instinctively, I flinched, expecting a heart-stopping, up-close-and-personal demonstration of how cold her hands actually were.  This has happened before.

“That’s how many of the neighbors complained that you don’t have any lights up this year.”

Through an ironic and frustrating turn of events, I’d been too busy to hang or program anything for Christmas 2010.

Fortunately, today’s schedule was totally open.  I found enough inventory in the workshop (an E16 ethernet bridge + 16 strings) to assemble a nifty little triangle tree.  It measures 12′ tall and 11′ wide at the base.

After letting it run for a few hours, I checked the control statistics (the E16 contains an internal webserver which allows for easy field configuration and feedback) and was pleased to see that one point one million Art-Net packets had been successfully received and processed for each of the E16′s four universes.

Amazing.

Stills (click to enlarge):

Video:

(Note that YouTube was supposed to swap out the regular audio for a bouncing happy Christmas track.  But I don’t think it’s working for all playback locations.  Do you hear music or just road noise?)

Florida Artist Jeff Slack built this amazing star for a local church service using 4 strings of RGB nodes, a T3 controller, precisely cut art glass and lots of patience.  It appears to be about 4′ in diameter.

Jeff's Christmas Star

Landy in Oklahoma (and author of the nifty and free .Matrix Art-Net Pixel Mapping Software sent over these fun clips.  His system includes 8 node strings and a couple T3 controllers.

Christmas Lights – 4 – Christmas Jam from Landy Bible on Vimeo.

Christmas Lights – 3 – Mad Russians Christmas from Landy Bible on Vimeo.

Christmas Lights – 1 – Christmas In The Air from Landy Bible on Vimeo.

Thanks, Jeff and Landy, for sharing your work.

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