Baby, it’s cold outside
No, I’m not calling you ‘baby’ – it’s the title to a VERY non-religious holiday song. I won’t even call it a Christmas song. I usually skip over that one when it comes on the CD or radio. But it sure is cold outside. How do I know? At 8am it was around 0 F and very windy. I was out on the lake with the snow blower clearing the ice for a skating rink. It’s close to regulation hockey rink size….but just a little bigger. More is always better, isn’t it?
vimeo Click this Link to see the video on Vimeo
Did you see the movie Spy Kids 2? The third brain lives – was a line in the movie. Well, I don’t have a third brain, but the third light controller lives!
The first 2 Renard SS24 boards were working just fine (so I thought) until I added some lights on bushes in the driveway island – connected to the 2nd controller. All they did is flicker very dimly, even with the data cable disconnected. Something was really wrong. It seemed that channels 17+ on the board didn’t work correctly, and the third SS24 board in line wasn’t receiving any data. I triple-checked the data cable and even ran a new one, but it didn’t help. I didn’t want to remove all the wires and take the board out to check solder joints or do other troubleshooting in the 0 F degree temperatures, so what’s the next thing to do? Ask the experts, of course. A quick post to the DIYC forum and I had a good suggestion about 30 minutes later. It turns out that the 3rd PIC microprocessor on the board runs the last 8 channels on the board (17-24), along with passing the RS-485 data to the next board daisy chained down the line. All that was needed was to re-program the PIC and it’s working. I hooked up some more lights today so we’ll see how it looks tonight.
The last thing to do is get some more Cat5 and extension cords so I can hook up the last light controller board. It’s really necessary because there are 6 mini trees that are critical to some of the sequencing. Without those trees flashing, it loses a lot of the impact.
