Tis the season … anybody done any Christmas tree light control with a Fez?
Something similar to this Arduino project …
[url]http://www.deepdarc.com/2010/11/27/hacking-christmas-lights/[/url]
-Eric
Another contest may be? 
We talked about but but there is no enough time.
You could save a lot of time by just giving Foekie (Robert) the prize ahead of time. 
-Eric
Lol yes he is good at making projects 
Hahaha 
I must say that I like this idea. However my time is pretty short at the moment. 
All of my spare time is either spent on rosvem or my girlfriend.
You guys only have to start the contest with a post and add the poll again 
I do like this idea, maybe I will hack something up. A FEZ Christmas tree would be cool 8)
This is pretty easy to do, just a crapton of relays and a crapton of lights. The lighting sequences could be played back from a file created by a simple application in full size .NET.
There’s a house near me that puts up a massive amount of lights and stuff around this time of the year. This year, their entire yard was light up, and they had a circular projection screen (Pink Floyd-esque) with the audio to the movie being played over an FM transmitter on 95.1 and the lights sync’d to the same audio. :o
crapton? ;D
There are a couple of houses in my area here too … where they must be spending a crapton of money to set up and power one of these monstrositys. Glad there isn’t one on my street though … wouldn’t want the extra noise and traffic.
-Eric
Ive a feeling this is an american thing… but I have seen “Christmas Lights”…
This is the kind of display that I’m talking about. Awesome if it isn’t in you neighborhood.
Wow!
That is so cool!
Thanks for sharing!
pore neighbors
But yes it looks cool too
[quote]There are a couple of houses in my area here too … where they must be spending a crapton of money to set up and power one of these monstrositys. Glad there isn’t one on my street though … wouldn’t want the extra noise and traffic.
[/quote]
Yep, there was a lot of traffic on the street… I guess I have to admit I was part of it…
sadly not, here in the Netherlands it is seen also. Not sure of it is already that “massif” as on that video but still, last year there where house that lighted the street anough 
Driver up: http://www.fezzer.com/project/196/ge-35-christmas-lights-individually-addressable/
OutputCompare couldn’t cut 10us timing so I hacked SPI to do the job. There may be a better way, but this seems solid if you can spare the extra SPI pins we don’t use.
PWM should do 10 uS timing, FYI.
@ Chris – I think PWM signaling is fast enough but I need to send 26 bits of data for each bulb, so around 1kbits with consistent timing. I didn’t see a way to do any buffered PWM operations with Fez/netmf. With SPI I can pass it a byte array and have the chip handle outputing the sequence correctly. With PWM I have to modulate timing for each bit, at least the way I was using it. But I may be overlooking something.
Running a sequence from SD card: Fez (.NET Micro Framework) controlled lights... running a sequence from an SD card on Vimeo
You can generate all kind of waveforms using output compare
I started down that route because that seemed the best approach but I couldn’t get anything shorter than 50us from OutputCompare. With SPI I had to do some tricks to get up to 20us (sending data in 4-bit chunks @ 400khz makes 10us pulses).