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 To inform viewers that the show is synchronized to music – and to clue them in that the show’s music is available on a low-power FM radio station – in 2008 I built an electronic sign that resides in a window near the front door.The sign is 24-inches by 8-inches, has 768 5mm blue light-emitting diodes (LEDs) and is housed in an oak wooden frame, which brings the overall dimensions to 26½-by-10½. The sign’s technology is based on a circuit developed by DIY Light Animation’s Robert Jordan; he called it the LedTriks. His original plan was that light show enthusiasts would put the 768 LEDs onto 3-foot-by-9-foot pegboard and wire it all up by hand. Further, initially the circuit required it to be driven constantly by Vixen (in a practical application, this meant the light master had to dedicate an entire personal computer to running the sign).  In 2008 the technology changed quite a bit: Tim Wells from Melbourne, Australia, designed a circuit that could feed the LedTriks while Vixen could independently control the show, both on the same computer, which eliminated the need for a separate PC (he called it a Triks-C) and Frank Kostyun of Phoenix, Ariz., designed an 8-inch-by-8-inch printed circuit board (and ordered mass quantities in order to drive the price down) to ease construction issues.The Triks-C (there is another board in the DIYC world called the “Ren-C” and Wells said that he named it similarly; also, say Triks-C real fast and it comes out “trixie”) uses an Atmel ATTiny2313 microprocessor to take in the data from Vixen once and then spool it back out to the LedTriks in a manner the latter board is expecting. It is a marvel that $20 or so of parts can substitute for a full personal computer.  I bought both Wells’ Triks-C board and three of Kostyun’s printed circuit boards and after they arrived, began soldering madly.Seven-hundred-sixty-eight LEDs means 1536 soldered joints; there were probably another 100 or so on the Triks-C – not to mention the 100-plus for the LedTriks board itself. Whew. The Triks-C board expects to be driven by the same type of data as the vanilla LedTriks, which is generated in Vixen. But rather than have Vixen run the LedTriks file, Wells developed a command-line application that feeds his Triks-C board (it still uses the serial port). The whole mess is powered through a standard lamp timer to come on in the afternoon and turn off late at night. I have written a couple of command-line scripts that invoke the proper Vixen files at the proper times of day – meaning that the sign says different things depending upon the what time it is. In addition, I have used the sign year-round, welcoming guests to our home. |