rogerhanson.com

How’s that for consistency?

It’s now after Christmas and today is New Year’s Day. It’s cold and windy outside. The fire AND furnace are going inside.

What’s been happening? The Christmas lights have been giving me problems lately. They’re up and running, but one of the controller boards decided to stop working properly, some of the other lights don’t come on and I didn’t get all I wanted to put up this year. The lights aren’t that bad, but not as polished as I was hoping to get. Sequencing didn’t really happen this year, either. I ‘borrowed’ some sequences from the Richard Holdman 2007 light show. Don’t get too excited about that….borrowing sequences is perfectly acceptable in the Christmas light world. I’ll try to get some video this year and post it. It’s too cold outside now.

Since we’ve had a lot of snow early this year, I picked up a couple old snowmobiles from the auto mechanic I’ve been going to in St. Boni. We have a 1988 Yamaha Exciter 570 and a 1990 Polaris 500 Indy. The Yamaha  needed a little attention, and still has a couple issues, but it’s ridable. The Polaris has a problem that needs to be checked out, but it also ridable. Actually, they both go pretty fast. We’ve been up to 70mph on both of them so far. I’m guessing the Indy may be able to hit 80+ and the Exciter may go near 100. Mitch needs to take a snowmobile safety class, which starts 1/13. Holly is old enough to not need the class, but has to take an online test to get her certificate. Link to snowmobile pictures

For Christmas, we went to my aunt and uncle’s house in Mankato for lunch, then my mom and dad’s house for supper and opening presents. It was a nice time. The weather and roads were good

The third and final post of the day. Summary of what was done with the lights:

• Data cables working on all of the controllers (using RS-232 going to the first controller)
• LED Portafloods working (had some wired backwards that were fixed)
• Antenna up/mounted – tuned to 105.1 MHz
• Transmitter installed up by the antenna – tuned to 105.1 MHz
• Audio cable built and installed
• Found a broken leg on one of the 24SS board regulators. Still working but need to fix that tomorrow

I have all five controller boards communicating! It took some brain cells to figure out all the problems, but they’re working. Hopefully it will continue to work until I shut down the lights later this winter. I even have all the LED Portaflood lights running. The LED strobes may not get used this year, but I’ll work hard to get some of them up.

Fighting with the Christmas lights for time, is the need to practice the song I’m playing on saxophone for church in a couple weeks. I got the sax back from repair at Schmitt Music yesterday. A quick test seems to show that what I took it in for is fixed, but now I have a super-easy squeak going from a low G to a middle D. I’ll have to check it out more when I practice.

I was having trouble getting the data from the PC to the light controller boards. There was just no communication at all. It turns out that the RS-232 to RS-485 converter I have bit the dust. I wasted most of yesterday trying to get the communications working. So, for now it’s running on straight RS-232 from PC to the first controller board. I haven’t actually checked to see if the communications is getting passed along to the rest of the boards. That’s the project for today. I’m at the theoretical limit of RS-232 cabling since the cable is just at about 50′ long and I’m running at 57,600 bits per second. I think the 50′ limit is supposed to be for 19,200 bps so I’m probably way over the suggested max length. You know what they say about theories, they’re made to be broken. Actually, there are guys who have ran RS-232 much longer than 50′, so I hope there won’t be any problems. There are still mostly just white lights up. The only color is in the mini and mega trees. The real trees just have white.

Time to get back to work.