Here's a Grinch ??

[RRohn]

Hi there and welcome to wonderful world of blinky flashy! I have the Grinch system with a total of 128 channels. This includes 32 SSRs out in the yard. It does use a lot of Cat5 cable but i bought 1000 feet of it at Lowes for only 60 dollars. Its very cold and rains a lot where i live at Christmas time but the Grinch performs remarkably well for not having dimming capability. You can get dimmer boards for it if you want but it costs more per channel. Assembly of the Grinch and SSRs was not that difficult. However, a diode (1N4001) was placed in line with the power supply from +5V to +4.6V to make it work. This is not mentioned in the assembly plans and i had to look up a lot of threads to find the answer. I recommend the Grinch system for beginners.

[dirknerkle]

The Grinch is a good board, but it's getting harder to find the chips for it. Mactayl has created some nice alternatives which also do dimming, are inexpensive to build and can work with the same SSRs that the Grinch uses...