But seriously, are there any retail PLC's available for AC outlets ? I googled PLC, but didn't find too much on the retail side. Think it would be cool to have 3 or 4 sets of lights flashing in patterns.
I don't know about that. There is a light that flashes to the upeer left of the house (some tower light?) and that flashing is steady throughout the display.
I dunno.. it just looks like video compression artifacts rather than footsteps to me.
I think it's legit. I mean.. people do wild stuff when it comes to the holidays... my brother's neighbor does his own 4th of July fireworks synchronized with music.
Pretty sure it is not time-lapse. I think you are seeing mpeg artifacts making the grass appear to move.
Look closely at the left portion of the image where there is a white tower beacon in the sky. I am pretty sure it would not blink that rythmically (as it would in real life) with time-lapse video.
I believe the video is real. Jon Daggett created MidiLites (www.midilite.com), lights controlled by computer, by first doing it at his house. His company now sells kits and sets up "Living Christmas Tree" displays around the country, as well as the original here in Central Va. at Jerry Falwell's church.
I have a documentary on The Living Christmas Tree that talks quite a bit about MidiLite and has some footage of Jon setting up his home display. The amount of cabling running through his house is unbelievable. I'll have to go back and watch it again to see how many lights and how much cable.
Yea ... It's real alright. The owner's [alleged] name is Carson Williams and it was done last year (Christmas 2004). He wrote about it in this thread (warning ... slow load time)
I'm still amazed and would love to know if anyone has found a [cheap?]PLC-connected relay device to power AC lighting.
At my church we have an annual "Living Christmas Tree" production. We don't use midilights system, but we do have 108 Dimmer channels on our "tree", controlling some 86,500 mini-lights, and about 250 C-9s. We also have a 24 point star with a seperage dimmer channel for each of the star points. (This in addition to normal theatrical lighting)
Cost of the Dimmer channels= about $2200 Cost of the lights = about $3000
Control is done by a custom program that we wrote ourselves, we use DMX (the standard theatrical lighting protocal) to hook everything up.
This guy seems to have about 50 channels of lighting, and I would guess half as many bulbs as we do, so he probably could have spent around $2500 for the set-up. It would take us about 5-6 hours to program that song in our system, so if he has something similer, the time investment for a single song is high, but not absurd