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Christmas 2004 Rhodes House (Frank Rhodes)
| This is a wide shot of our house. We have a little over 50,000 lights. A number of static display (A couple of blowups, a Polar Bear with its bottle of Coke, A family of deer drinking at a pond of blue lights, Santa's sleigh and 3 reindeer, A skating Santa, and a Ginger Bread house). I have 23 trees wrapped with over 15,000 lights. My center pieces are a flowing waterfall feeding a stream and a pond. And a 14 foot Christmas Tree that changes colors every 6 seconds. |
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| This is our side yard. It has the ginger bread house and some other static displays. |
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| The entry to our house |
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| The high peak of our roof. I hate outlining this part of our house, but I do like the way it looks. |
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| This shot show the waterfall and the 14ft Christmas Tree. I used standard 4 channel chaser lights for the waterfall, but I cut off the controllers and am using my own. I have 11 strings of chaser lights and I wanted them to be in sync. |
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| Some of our blowups. |
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| Our Christmas Train. The train and the Polor bear in background were new additions this year. |
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| This is also new this year. I needed to add a Sleigh to my display. |
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| Here is our pond. I used chicken wire to help keep the lights from falling into the grass. Last year I just had the pond and drinking deer. This year I added the waterfall and the stream feeding the pond. |
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| The stream and pond from our entry way. |
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| Another shot of the stream. It also shows many of the wrapped trees and the waterfall. |
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| Here is the control box I have driving my animation. This is my first year, so I only have 7 channels. I am using a Picaxe 18x microprocessor to drive the SSRs. I have 1 bank of 4 SSRs driving the waterfall channels. I used standard blue chaser lights, but I cut off the controls and am using the picaxe to drive them. This way all 11 chaser light strings stay in sync. I fire one channel at a time every half second. I then have a bank of 3 SSRs driving the Christmas tree. Each channel is driving about 1700 lights. I fire each channel every 6 seconds, and on the 4th cycle I turn all 3 channels on. |
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