Christmas in Brewster

I went out to my Dad’s tonight and he helped me attached wheels and a handle to the enclosure for my portable sub-panel. I took the panel with me and fit it in the enclosure. It fits well, and looks pretty good too. I left it with him in the back of his truck to bring to me in the morning (don’t think the whole shebang would fit in my car), but we had quite a bit of rain tonight, so that should test the water tightness of it. The elbow coming out the protect the wire opening hasn’t been cemented in, but it fits tight enough that it should have kept the water out tonight. It’ll be a good test I suppose. Next I need to clean it up a bit and paint it. I’ll get some pics up as soon as I get it back in my hands.

I got pixel #6 working tonight. A set of the green LEDs wasn’t coming on, turns out it works a lot better if you actually solder the joint as opposed to just letting the lead poke through the hole. Oh well, I like easy fixes. I’ve got another set of LEDs in testing, but I doubt I’ll get to soldering up another until after the weekend.

I also took some time to install one of the Ren2DMX boards in one of the controller enclosures. Turned out pretty good except I drilled too close to one of the standoffs so that made everything a bit more challenging. I also think I drilled with one size too big of a drill bit (seem to be missing one), but I just filled in the hole with hot glue like on the previous holes. The controller works great with the adapter board. Good job Frank! I wired it up with the new Sewell Cat5 cable I got off geeks.com, that stuff is nice cable, especially for being solid rather than stranded. It’s perfect for the kind of stuff I need it for.

I also got a nice surprise in the mail today. I was talking to RPM about his DMX dongle, and mentioned that I had intentions of getting one of his designs just to play with, but didn’t think I should be spending the money this year as things are starting to get tight, putting most of my Christmas Light project spending on hold. Anyhow he sent me the board and most of the parts for free. He even included one of his new Grinch DMX converter boards. Talk about the spirit of Christmas in June! I just want to thank Robert, he is what the DIY community is all about. Once I get a few more things sold on eBay I’ll put in a small Mouser order to finish populating the board and give it a try.

I put my PSP and Firefly Mini remote on eBay tonight, and the PSP already sold Buy It Now, which is awesome. Now I only need to sell about $130 worth of stuff to pay for my commitments over at DLA for the wireless DMX stuff, and any extra I can use to populate Robert’s DMX dongle and save the rest for an FM transmitter. Once I get the transmitter I should be able to put on a pretty decent show with the equipment I have and not have to put any more money into it.

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Yesterday I came home from work in the afternoon to begin the process of installing the 220V 50A outdoor outlet I need to connect my temporary sub-panel to. It is also the only way I had to actually test the panel, since I was unable to locate any 4 wire, 220 outlets anywhere. I got the hole drilled in the side of the house and the wire ran, and decided it was way to hot to be doing this stuff, so I went back to work in the A/C. After work I came home and got the conduit cemented in and the box attached to the house. I got the conduit sealed all nice as well as the top of the box. I think I will go out sometime in the next two days and put a bead of silicone all around the box just to be safe. I got the outlet wired up on the outside and was going to come inside and cut the power so I could wire it to the breaker, but I realized the DVR was recording two of my wife’s shows, and didn’t figure it was a good time to cut the power. So I decided to wait until today.

I came home from work today and set about wiring the outlet to the breaker panel. I cut the power and got it all wired up nice and purty. I took my temporary sub-panel outside for its first test run. I flipped on the breaker and there were no sparks or fire, so that was a good first sign. I started powering up the sub-panel, but soon realized the SSRs weren’t turning on the outlets. I started having thoughts that maybe there wasn’t enough draw to turn on the SSRs from the GFCIs and the GFCI’s couldn’t latch because there wasn’t any power. To test my theory I thought I would jumper across the SSR, so I grabbed some alligator clips and made a quick jumper.

So I’m leaning in the grass with this metal alligator clip and for some reason thought it was a good idea to try and attach it to a live circuit. I’m sure this is hard to believe, but since I had the hot end in one hand, and my bare legs on the grass (also known as ground), the power decided it needed to go through me (shortest path to ground). I quickly realized what I was doing and insulated the alligator clip and stood up so my shoes were separating me from the ground and got the GFCI to turn on, but still the SSR wasn’t providing power. It turns out I had the DC turn on wires wired backwards. Apparently when I tested them a month or so ago and marked the + terminal on one of them, I couldn’t have been more wrong. Once I got that corrected I started testing with a fan. When I would turn off the SSRs, the GFCI would trip, almost every time. I started to theorize that the fan (still spinning once power was removed) was inducing a current in one of the wires and causing the GFCI to trip. I decided that since I wasn’t going to be powering fans with this anyhow to get one of my controllers and plug it in. I power cycled it a few times and had no problems, so I’m pretty encouraged that the design will work…. Which is a very good thing since I won’t have the time or money to redo it!

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The last few nights I’ve spent working on my first Vixen AddIn. I wanted a way to individually set the levels of separate channels so that I could play with different color mixes on my Pixels. The built in Channel test feature only lets you set the intensity of all selected channels at once, not individually. I started looking at other software that might do what I wanted, especially since the Lynx dongle was based on the Enttec Pro, I thought I could find some free DMX console software that would do what I wanted. I couldn’t make anything work, so I went back to Vixen, since I knew it could talk to the dongle.

I started poking around with the previously mentioned Red Gate’s .Net Reflector, and found how the built in channel test feature worked and figured out how the addins worked. The tough part was determining how to access the IExecution object, when none was passed to the addin. I found some code that I still don’t completely understand, but seems to return an instance of whatever interface you are looking for, so in this case I told it I wanted an IExecution object, and it went looking for one and if it found one, gave it back to me. Once I had this object it was fairly trivial to send channel values to it to then be output to the dongle. The nice thing about doing it this way is it will work with whatever output plugin(s) you are using, whether it be DMX, Renard, or whatever.

**DISCLAIMER**
I have only tested this with Vixen 2.1.0.0, and only on my development system. While the AddIn shouldn’t do anything harmful to your vixen sequences or your system, I make no guarantees of that as this is alpha software. Please take the appropriate precautions of backing up your Vixen install and your sequences before trying this AddIn.

AddIn DLL (multichanneltest.zip)

You should just be able to unzip the DLL into your “AddIns” directory within your Vixen install. Once this file is in your AddIns directory, Starting Vixen should yield a “Multi Channel Test” entry in your Add-ins menu. The AddIn will not work if a sequence is not loaded, and it will politely tell you so. Once a sequence is loaded, choose the Multi Channel Test entry from the Add-Ins menu to start.

Along the top are the boxes for the channels, these are the channels that the sliders will control. If you want them to all be sequential, set the first channel to the desired start channel and then click the “Auto Number” button.

The bottom boxes will show the current intensity for the given slider. This may or may not be the actual intensity of the channel depending on the setting of the master slider. The master slider overrides any values set in the individual sliders.

As I said, this is a rough alpha version as a proof of concept. It does what I intended it to do so I’m not quite sure what if any improvements I will make, here is the [download id="1"], so you can tear it up to your heart’s desire.

In testing the AddIn I found that the first pixel I built already had a Green LED go bad. It was keeping all three in the section from lighting. At first I wasn’t quite sure how to figure out which of the three was causing the problem. I put the volt meter on each of the three and found that two were reading 2.2V and one was reading 6.2V (they should all read about 3.2V). I was figuring it was the 6.2V that was the bad one, but just to be sure I put a known good one across the bad one’s legs, and the known good one along with the other two lit right up so this further reinforced my guess. I de-soldered it and popped the new one in and it worked like a charm. Hopefully I don’t have to go through that too many more times.

Posted in Miscellaneous, Pixels  |  2 Comments »

I finally got my camera back last week and was looking through the pictures still on the memory card and came across some that I took when I had to take apart one of the GFCI outlets on my temporary power panel. You are probably asking why one would want to do that, well let me tell you a story…

I was originally going to use ring terminals on all of the wires connecting to the GFCI outlets. Reason being I used stranded wire and stranded wire doesn’t play well with the screw terminals on outlets, so I was going to remove the screw, and screw it back in with the ring terminal attached. Well, apparently if you remove the screw from the GFCI outlets I bought, you can’t get it back in. I tried everything, I just couldn’t get the little nut part to stay in place long enough to tighten the screw. The only way I found to fix it was to take apart the outlet. So I proceeded to remove the “Do Not Open This Outlet” sticker, and I opened it. I got it fixed (whether or not it works, is still up in the air). I ended up shoving the wires through the holes in the back of the outlets and tightening them with the provided screws. Anyhow, I thought I would shoot some pics of a GFCI while it was open in case anyone cared.

Last night I put together the 4 Ren2DMX boards that I need to convert my Renard cabling to DMX. I think I know how I’m going to mount them in the enclosures, but I keep forgetting to stop at the hardware and pick up some screws for them.

Tonight I finished my 4th pixel. I think they’re starting to look pretty darn good and by my 30th, I should be a pro!

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I’m still hoping to get a plugin written to control my BetaBrite sign from within vixen. I’m still not convinced I’ll have time to do it, but one can always hope. As a backup plan, I found a command line program from Industrologic, Inc., betacom.exe, that will send commands to the sign from the command line. I figure wost case, I can use Vixen’s launcher plugin and control the sign that way. Anyhow, I took a break from pixel building tonight and was poking some more into the internals of Vixen. A tool that someone recommended to me over at DIYC is .NET Reflector from Red Gate Software. It basically decompiles the program and lets me see all of the hooks and internal structures. This software will be quite invaluable to me should I find the time to work on my plugin.

I’ve currently got 3 out of 30 pixels built. I’ve got a set of LEDs in the breadboard testing tonight, so I should be ready to do for a 4th tomorrow. I’ve been running the LEDs for at least a few hours before installing them with the hope being that I’ll find a bad one before I solder it in and have to get it back out. I’m sure if I pushed I could get 2 built in a night, but usually once I get one done, I want to put it in the string and see it light up with the others.

I think I’ve almost got my layout finalized for this year. Still have to decide how the icicle lights will be split up and the exact location of the pixels, but then I should be ready to start sequencing. Somehow, I’m not really looking forward to that.

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I think [hope] that the portable sub-panel, or at least the electrical part of it, is done. I finished wiring up the SSRs tonight and did some more testing to be sure there aren’t any shorts and what not. I was going to plug it into the unused stove receptacle upstairs, but it turns out it is a three wire receptacle, not a 4 wire one. So as of yet, I have no way to test it. I’m going to peek around at work and see if we have any 4 wire 220 outlets, but I’m betting not because most of them are for welders and those are 3 wire. So probably the only way I’m going to test it is to get my outdoor receptacle wired up. That has to be on the list for a day that the wife and kids are gone (which is rare) because I want to completely turn the power off to install that rec, just to be safe.

I tested out the Ren2DMX board that Frank sent me that was already populated, works like a charm. Only three more to build… and 29 more pixels… and 3 more arches… and icicle lights… and sequencing… and many many cords to build… I’ll be busy for a while!

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The replacement pixel boards arrived Thursday. JEC even had them made with a fancy white solder mask in the hopes it would reflect better than the standard green solder mask. I rushed to assemble one Thursday night. I got it assembled but was up until 1:00AM playing with it. At first I tried the code in the DIYC file library that allows for addressing without re-flashing the PIC, but didn’t have any luck. It seemed like the firmware was working, but wouldn’t respond to any vixen commands, so my best guess is that I wasn’t programming the channel correctly. I quickly gave up and put JEC’s standard firmware on for testing purposes. It fired right up and worked as expected. The only hiccup was that I put an amber LED where a red one was supposed to go, so I spent a few minutes desoldering that and replacing it.

I got a few of JEC’s power injector boards and they made life a lot simpler for getting power to the pixel. I wired the injector to a molex connector from an old CPU fan and plugged it into an old power supply to get my 12V. Friday night I put the pixel on my multimeter to see what the LEDs I chose draw at full power. It was a little under .5A, so in theory this power supply should be able to power 50 of them, or in my case, my whole string of 30. JEC recommends anything above 20 be powered separately because the CAT5 cable can’t handle that kind of load.

I wanted to see the pixel do a rainbow of colors, and didn’t want to hand encode all the values in vixen. I’ve been working on a PHP script that will let me modify vixen sequences, so I used it to do it. I found that rather than using RGB, HSV allows you to quickly do a rainbow by holding S and V constant at 1 and varying H from 0 to 1. I also found a bit of PHP code that would let me convert HSV to RGB. Once I had the RGB values I wrote them to the vixen sequence channel data. I still need to figure out how, from an RGB value, to determine the yellow and white components of that value, so that I can introduce the yellow and white channels appropriately. I also tested out my vixen script that generates a flicker effect on given channels with the amber LEDs on the pixel. The effect was actually quite convincing and still has room for some tweaking.

Pending water tightness tests, I’m planning on using 5LB white containers that deli salads come it. I have easy access to them and they’re free so I like that aspect of them. You’ll see in the video below, that the white plastic diffuses the LEDs quite effectively and still allows enough light out to keep it bright.

Yesterday was my daughter’s birthday party, so I didn’t have time to play, but today I took some time while the other daughter was napping to shoot a quick video of the pixel in action. I was rather disappointed because there is some very noticeable flicker in the video that isn’t apparent to the naked eye. I’ll have to see if there are any other settings on the camera that will help that in the future.

Saturday I finally received the DMX2Renard converter boards from Frank. He only had 5 so sent me one he had already populated. It was kind of neat because the one he populated, he put a RJ45 plug right on the back rather than the specified jack and needing a small patch cord. I think I’m going to try that trick on the other ones I assemble. It makes for a neat little add-on module. I think that pretty much catches up on all the news. We’ve decided to go on vacation this year, so pretty much any further blinky spending will be put to a stop, but honestly I think I have enough to keep me busy and still put on a great show for 2009. I’ve still got to pay for the stuff I’ve committed to over at DLA for the wireless DMX stuff. I went back and forth whether to drop out of the coops, but in the end, to run the Pixels I’d need a DMX splitter, so I might as well keep with the wireless and then effectively have a splitter.

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The last few nights I’ve been doing more work on my temporary electrical panel. I should probably come up with a name for it, like Panel of Power, only better. I’ll work on that. As of tonight I’ve gotten all of the main outlets wired and the breakers in place. The last outlet, the one that will run the timer that will control the SSRs, isn’t in because I thought I had an extra GFCI here, but turns out that the one I have is ivory, and we can’t have an ivory outlet in a panel full of white ones. I’m going to see if the hardware will trade me a white one for the ivory one tomorrow.

I have some more pictures to post from the last few nights, however they are on my other camera card. That camera decided to die on me Monday night and the warranty is up on it in a week, so I was pretty quick to send it in for factory service. Anyhow, that camera card is on my desk at work because I keep forgetting to bring it home. Tonight’s pictures came courtesy of the camera my wife uses most of the time.

Back to the electrical panel. I had everything wired up and pretty like, and was all excited about it because it looked pretty darn good. I figured I had better do some testing on it to make sure there weren’t any shorts before I powered it up. Much to my dismay, the ground and the neutral were shorted together somewhere. I started using my CSI skills and found that the culprit was the cable clamps on the breaker box. They had some how found their way through enough of the insulation on 2 neutral wires to tie them to ground. Upon examining the wires, all I could find was some marks where the clamps were, but no exposed copper. It must have been something as small as a pin pricking the insulation because once I loosened the clamps and moved the wires the short went away. I was initially going to just wrap them in electrical tape and re-clamp them, but then I decided that since they were all wire tied pretty well, that I would just leave the clamping part off.

It would seem that these weren’t the right kind of clamps to use, but I didn’t see anything else at the hardware that would work. Maybe the key is just surrounding the wires with something, like electrical tape. After more testing I determined that the clamps on the receptacle boxes weren’t doing the same thing, but it still worries me a bit how easily a short was created. After removing the clamps and re-securing the wires, I thoroughly tested the whole thing for shorts and couldn’t find any, so that’s a good sign.

All that’s left is to put the last receptacle in and run the control wires for the SSRs. Then I should be ready to test. Since I don’t have my 50A 240V outlet installed outside yet, I will probably just plug it into the unused stove outlet (the one whose circuit I’m stealing for the outside outlet) to see if it works.

Also, in Pixel news, I received a tracking number from JEC for the replacement boards, so that means they are finally on their way. I’m hoping they will arrive Fri. or Sat., but I proabably won’t have time to assemble one until Sun. at the Earliest. Still no sign of the Ren2DMX boards, but I’m still holding out hope.

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