There’s a ton of home-brew light controllers out there, but they takes some time to get all the materials, and require soldering. Then there’s the expensive commercial controllers you can order online, if you have money to burn. The simplest way to get your lights animated is with a cheap 8 channel light controller.
I found this great tutorial online for animating lights and pretty much followed it word for word. in a nutshell, you’ll run your lights to 8 separate power strips, which you’ll be modifying with a wire to your controller. This whole process took me around 3 hours after the lights were fully hung. It’s really not as tricky as it sounds.
Each power strip has three wires to the power outlet, green, black and white. First we cut the wire in half, strip the insulation and cut out the green wire (not used since we can’t ground the lights). The black wire is then stripped and connected back to itself with wire twists.
Finally, the white wire split between two new wires which run to the controller. I used outdoor lighting wire but you could use any 16 gauge wire you like. The new wire breaks the circuit, the lights won’t turn on until the new wire connects. That’s what the controller will be doing, acting like a light switch which we can program from the computer.
I drew up a little flowchart to show you how the wiring looks with one string of lights. If you wanted more detailed instructions, check out the tutorial from KSO Christmas lights. They have much more images and wiring instructions.
December 21st, 2008 at 10:06 pm
It’s always good to see videos of displays that were setup using the tutorial I wrote. It looks like you definitely spent a lot of time preparing for this.
December 22nd, 2008 at 7:05 am
Thanks for the great tutorial. This hobby is pretty intimidating to get into with all the home brew solutions, but yours was a nice easy off the shelf thing we can do.
Oh, and my wife would like to thank you for helping me not burn the house down.