We do our best to build everything we use in the display. Not only is buying pre-made showpieces, controllers, etc. costly, it takes all of the fun out of it. Half the fun of putting on these shows is building everything ourselves.
Electrical
The house already had a 220V 50A breaker that was running to the stove circuit, however we have a gas stove, so that wasn’t being used. I installed a 220V 50A RV plug on the outside of the house and wired it to this breaker, after disconnecting the stove circuit. A portable sub-panel plugs into this outlet. The sub-panel currently has six 15A GFCI circuits, allowing for 90 amps of power. We are currently only using about 30 amps, so there is plenty of room for expansion. From the sub-panel, 300′ of 12/3 cable runs to each of the four controllers. From the controllers, approximately 2000′ of extension cord runs to each of the show pieces or lights. 1000′ of this is SPT-3 wire with vampire plugs, the rest is mostly heavy duty outdoor extension cords.
Controllers
This year the show is running on four Renard 24 (Ren24) controllers. Each one was built by me. I ordered the bare circuit boards, the parts, and the enclosures and assembled each one into a working unit. This was about a month’s worth of work alone. The controllers are currently running DMX firmware, and are able to be used with any other equipment that can speak DMX. Each controller will control 24 channels (24 separate on/off circuits). This year I have a total of 96 channels of separate on/off control. The Renard series is also capable of dimming, and we take full advantage of this in the show.
DMX Dongle
The DMX signal that tells the controllers what to do is generated by a DMX dongle that was designed by Robert Martin. He suppled me with the circuit board and the parts, and once again, I assembled it to cut down on costs. It basically allows for functionality that would require a $150 piece of commercial equipment, for around $40.
FM Transmitter
In order to allow viewers to hear the music from the comfort of their own cars, and to prevent from having to play the music out side on speakers, thus annoying the neighbors, we transmit the audio on an unused FM station. We tried two different transmitters. Initially was a cheap Vastelec FM01. It worked well initially, but for some reason the quality of the transmission diminished about two weeks after the show started. We then purchased an EDM LCD RDS transmitter. This transmitter has been far superior to the Vastelec one in every way, and it allows us to display the name of the current song on the radios of viewer’s whose radios support RDS. The transmitter is attached to a simple dipole antenna that was tuned specifically to our transmitting frequency.
Show Computer
The show is running on an old Acer laptop that has a 650 Mhz PIII processor and 384MB of RAM that is running a custom version of Windows XP that has had most of the “bloat” stripped out of it. This allows it to run fairly fast for such an “ancient” machine. The only software installed on the machine is the software that controls the lights (Vixen), and the software that controls the text displayed on your radio (MiniRDS).