Sunday, December 05, 2010
Christmas Lights
It is that time of year and as usual we have our lights up on the house.
This year after being inspired by some YouTube videos of lights set to music I decided to investigate what it would take to get my lights set to music.
It turns out to not be a cheap thing to do but with a bit of know how and some perseverance I got it all working. By building it myself I managed to also get a huge amount of flexibility out of it as well.
I had a few mis-steps along the way ... in part due to the vagueness of documentation and a lack of good examples on the web.
I thought it was time to rectify that so I thought I would put up some posts on how I got it all working.
There are really only a couple of major components which are wired together along with some software I wrote on the PC and the PLC controller board that actually drives the lights.
The core components are the Comfile CUSB-36R and the Velleman K8055.
The CUSB-36R is the core of the unit. It runs a program that through relays turns power circuits on an off. In fact if you just want to control your lights using a custom flashing sequence this is pretty much the component that does it all.
The K8055 is a PC USB interface card. I use it to allow a laptop to tell the CUSB-36R when it should start its program. In that way I am able to synchronise the music the computer plays with the lights the CUSB-36R flashes.
In my next post we will look at how I set up the CUSB-36R.
This year after being inspired by some YouTube videos of lights set to music I decided to investigate what it would take to get my lights set to music.
It turns out to not be a cheap thing to do but with a bit of know how and some perseverance I got it all working. By building it myself I managed to also get a huge amount of flexibility out of it as well.
I had a few mis-steps along the way ... in part due to the vagueness of documentation and a lack of good examples on the web.
I thought it was time to rectify that so I thought I would put up some posts on how I got it all working.
There are really only a couple of major components which are wired together along with some software I wrote on the PC and the PLC controller board that actually drives the lights.
The core components are the Comfile CUSB-36R and the Velleman K8055.
The CUSB-36R is the core of the unit. It runs a program that through relays turns power circuits on an off. In fact if you just want to control your lights using a custom flashing sequence this is pretty much the component that does it all.
The K8055 is a PC USB interface card. I use it to allow a laptop to tell the CUSB-36R when it should start its program. In that way I am able to synchronise the music the computer plays with the lights the CUSB-36R flashes.
In my next post we will look at how I set up the CUSB-36R.
