Final initial tests

Well I have finished my initial tests that I needed to do so I can plan my layout. On Saturday I brought out last years controllers and hooked them up to make sure they are still operating and then I put them into a test pattern. Then I hooked them up to the strips I have left on the roofline all summer. Everything tested perfectly. The strips along the roof line looked great with no bad pixels.

My plan for Sunday was to mow my lawn and then straighten out all the strips. They are inside a pipe called PEX that they use for water. The PEX over time has tried to curl back up so the strips look a little wavy. Unfortunately the weather was not so great in the morning and I couldn't mow the lawn due to the wetness of the grass. So I mostly relaxed till noon and then went up to radio shack to pick up a couple items I needed for the radio transmitter. After I got back I ran a test on that.

The transmitter works better than I thought it would. I took a drive around my neighborhood to see how well it transmits. With the transmitter inside the house I was able to drive through most of my neighborhood and hear it.

After that successful test I just relaxed and really kept thinking about my next steps. I decided to pull out my sequence player and get that up to speed. The player is a Raspberry Pi Model B using Falcon Pi Player software. 

The Raspberry Pi is just a small computer you can buy for around $40. It only has the bare essentials on it. You need an SD card to run the Operating System and a USB Drive to be able to save Sequences, Music and Video. I also added a USB Wireless Ethernet Adapter. The Pi already has an Ethernet port but that will be used to communicate with the e6804 controllers via e1.31 (essentially DMX over Ethernet) so I will use the wireless to be able to access the Pi to set things up and control everything via their web interface.

I turned on the Pi and everything booted as it did last year. I knew they had a new version coming out so I looked to see that I was running version 0.2 and I noticed that just a few days ago they released version 0.4. I downloaded it and installed the new software.

After a little while the Pi rebooted with the new software without any issues. It also was able to read my old sequences and settings without any issue. 

My next step is I really need to finalize my layout and elements so I can start working on putting it together and also setting up all the software. This is my kind of project. It makes me think and keeps me busy.