RGB Pixel Mega Tree or Incan Mega Tree?

[n8huntsman]

I'm considering this as well, while trying to keep the cost down and keep it expandable. I'm thinking about making it a half mega tree, 180°. I will use 16 strands of 42 ws2801 pixels with 4" spacing and an e681. This will give me a tree around 13' tall. Anyone see anything wrong with that plan? How will that resolution look for text?

[bclodfelter]

I did a 10 strands of 50 lights GECE tree on a rigid wood frame. With the frame it was possible to reduce the effective spacing of the lights to something smaller than 10". I ended up with 15 columns by 32 rows leaving 20 lights to form two stars at the top of the tree. The clips that come with the lights work very well in this application.

Regarding sequencing, I used Vixen but controlling 1500 channels was a fools task in my book so I wrote a vixen driver to the tree that created virtual channels that could do something "interesting" on the tree. For example I had a virtual channel for each row. So if a wanted to turn on a row, I only had to turn on the RGB values for that channel. I did the same for columns, squares and diamonds. This was quick and easy as I only had a limited time to create the sequences. I believe this concept will work very well in Vixen 3.0.

For limited animations, I added a couple of virtual channels that would instruct the tree (via the Vixen driver) to load a BMP and index into it. This made simple animations very easy to do. I could draw the sequences in a bitmap editor outside of Vixen and then just adjust the controlling channels in Vixen to pick up the desired portion of the picture.

On the hardware side, the first thing I did was to cut off the GE controllers, add 16 gauge zip wire between each strand and its power supply and 24 gauge zip wire from the strand to my controller. The controller was a Rabbit 3770 Ethernet board with a couple of buffer ICs. This gave me a Ethernet link to the tree which worked pretty well. I could update the entire tree at about 25-30 Hz.

Attached (I hope) is a video of several different effects. Unfortunately, the quality of the video is below poor. The camera was completely unable to capture the vibrant colors that these lights can produce.

[boarder3]

Do you have any pics of wood frame i did a regular ge pixel tree with 10 strings of 50 but was thinking of eliminating the normal 3d tree to 2d like this.

[bclodfelter]

IMG-20111209-01819.jpg

The frame consisted of 30 1"x2"x8' of pieces of lumber. 15 of them were used full length to form the top of the tree. The other 15 were cut to 6' and the 2' remainder were used to join them to the other 15. This gave me 15 1"x2"x14' pieces. At the top, the 1"x2" were trimmed to 1" actual width making the top of the tree 15" wide. The bottom of the tree was set to something like 7' wide. Cross members at the top, bottom and mid-point held the stringers in place. A star was added to the top to cap the 15" width there.

The entire structure was mounted on a central pole comprised of lengths of 1" black iron pipe using U-bolts. Initially the pole was stabilized with 6 guy wires. This worked well but I upgraded to two support legs connected to the central 1" pipe about 2/3 of the way up the tree. This was very strong and I had no worries about wind and weather.

One nice aspect of a design using 8' and 6' lengths to from the stringers is that I could assemble the tree in halves and it also makes storage easier.

[boarder3]

thx for the pics i really considering not doing my 3d and using method for this year .

[g8rfn]

For the 3d versions... how have you guys mounted the lights?

ags0000, I would love to re-create pretty much your exact same setup as I believe its the most economical setup in terms of bang for your buck. Your pixels are perfectly spaced and oriented. How did you accomplish this? Seems like if they were just "hung at the top" like normal mega trees, then the big heavy bulbs of the GECEs would turn around backwards and look very scattered? any shots of the smaller tree in the sunlight?

Thanks much to all of you for the ideas!

[ags0000]

I just lost a long response (user error). Below are links to daytime photos of my tree in 2010 (10 strands folded into thirds) and 2011 (64 strands folded into halves). In both cases the pixels faced inwards and still looked good. Scrolling text effects required programming in reverse and on the back of the tree (pixels facing forwards). I did it this way because of constraints at the time but don't regret it. You might also give it a try. Good luck.

2010 - http://doityourselfchristmas.com/for...140#post144140

2011 - http://doityourselfchristmas.com/for...637#post194637

[g8rfn]

Awesome, thanks so much for the detail in these threads.

[budude]

I saw ags0000's tree in person - spectacular is the only word for it...