Been a while

It's been a while since I last posted. I had got sick for a little while so progress has been slow going. I am starting to run out of time. I have been having issues with my 4 other trees.. I decided against using a spiral and will do matrix style mini tree. I will have more options when sequencing.

I took the spiral cage and used 1/2" hardware cloth and cut them in strips. I used 50 pixels and the pixels fit great in the 1/2" hole.

Now the stars that I have I attached to the top using zip ties and eye hooks. I had wiring issues being different than the pixels so I had to open the stars and rewire them. Well my first round I had issues using butt connectors. I tried to go the easy cheap way that ended up causing problems. So I had to open them back up and solder them with some extensions.

Well after running some tests after redoing all the stars, I ran into more problems which seemed to be power issues. Bad data was being sent past the stars. Now I am at a loss and am frustrated. After some thinking I decided to take the LEDs in the stars and put in my own LEDs. It won't be as bright but I will be able to use multiple colors in the star.

I got two of them done tonight and have two more to do and then I have to zip type them to the trees. In the end it will look like this.

Hope to have them done before Thursday and I hope to have them on the lawn Thursday morning and figure out where to put my Technicolor C9 pixels. I hope to have everything done and running next weekend. 

Halloween over time for Christmas

Now that Halloween is over, it's time to continue on to more of a Christmas atmosphere.. Hallmark channel has started 24hr a day Christmas shows and I need to finish up my other lights and start to get them in place.. Today I removed my trees and matrix so I can do one final lawn mow for the year. Thankfully that is all done. 

I am now putting the bulb covers on my technicolor strings. I was doing them the wrong way before which hurt my hands. How they go together is with a plastic coupler but it didn't work so well by just screwing it together.

So I kinda learned that if I heat up the coupler that it will losen the plastic enough that it goes right on and then it hardens as it cools.

And now I just have 299 more to do. Much easier than how I was trying to do this earlier.

After these are done then I need to finish my mini-trees. The ones I have already done may get redone as well because I like how another person did something similar and I may replicate that.