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Actually it wasn't much soldering (except for the power injection and connectors). I had Ray Wu make me customized pebble pixels. 10 pixels=>1 meter wire=>10 pixels=>1 meter wire (etc) I created the Peace Stakes in groups of ten so I didn't have so many connections (and less changes of my connections getting wet).

I will be 65 next month (so maybe a senior), and have been playing with 2-way radio for over 50 years. Got my ham license 47 years ago, and a FCC 1st class RadioTelephone license 44 years ago. Been working professionally in communications / electronics for 44 years as well. Part of my job also involves electrical work (both 120/240Volt AC and also high current 48V DC). Also worked as a broadcast engineer (the audio side of it, not RF side) So, yea, I might know a thing or two on the subject of electronics. Like many others here, very happy to share my experience.

Thank you Mr P and thanks for your service. I'll do this

Ethernet is good to 300ft. RS 485 is good to 4000ft.

If your S6 Preview is setup correctly then it should only take 4 or 5 Minutes to convert your S4 Sequences to S6

Thank you for your help.

Start here. http://itsmebob.com/SD.html BobO has the papagayo link for the software. In addition he has created a a Program call Papagayo to LOR. It uses that data created by Papagayo files and turns that into Clipboard files to then post in sequences. I use it all the time. He also has tutorial videos linked to.

Thank you!! Phil has a keen eye for those items and appreciate him and all individuals in this forum has helped me on. After retiring in December 22, Year 23 was a lot of honey-do projects to catch up on and programming and prop prep was the last on the list. This year is much better, still have honey-do projects to work on but I have a LOT more time to devote to programming and prop prep. Very thankful this forum is here to rely on when I do not understand what is happening with programming and props. Did get a 3D printer and printing out some prop pieces (prop mounts, ect) to assist with better display of the props. There are a LOT of items to use with your props in 3D!!! Will need some clarification when I start hooking up the pixie link this year to replace my MP3 Director. So look for me in the forum with some of those Pixie Link questions....LOL Thank you everyone for the suggestions!!! John

Problem solved by Phil's quick look. The one thing I did not check in Preview Design was the resolution when grouping the tree with the star (tree and star have separate ids). It ended up 1 thru 4 mini trees resolution were set to 13 by 75 where mini trees 5 thru 8 were set at 2 by 8 resolution. Changed the last 4 mini trees to 13 x 75, tried copy from 1 thru 4 and paste 5 thru 8, ran a visual from the sequence, everything worked! Something as simple as not changing the resolution can cause problems. The problem came not from a copy and paste issue from Preview Design (use number 4 mini tree to make 4 copies) it was when I grouped each star id to its tree id and did not max out the resolution. Thank you Phil for catching it and everybody else for your suggestions!! Happy Easter, John

I have played around with Stem creation on cloud based sites before but not using a local running program. OpenVINO is a plug in which runs in Audacity entirely on your local machine. Once installed it will breakout any music file in up to four stems. Drums, Bass, Vocals and other instruments. IMO, it does a pretty good job with a minimum of artifacts. So if you have a song where you just can't quite make out some of the details, it might be worth a try. There are three other modules included besides the music splitter, Noise Reduction, Speech transcription and AI music generation. No messing about with logins, demos and the price is right......free. It's fairly easy to install into Audacity and can be found on Github along with instructions. It only works with Audacity v 3.4.2 and higher. https://github.com/intel/openvino-plugins-ai-audacity/releases

With 1 panel at 200w it takes about 11 hours to charge. AC takes a solid hour. I have 2 panels so I should be able to get the solar charge time down to maybe 6 or 7 hours. I have tested with simple devices, mostly USB items. AC items include a lamp, fan, and things like that. This weekend I will be testing out the projector and speakers to see how well it handles. After I get some stats with that, I will start to play around with the controllers for the show and see what it can do. The quality of the generator is great. It's about the size of a small ice cooler and weighs about 30lbs or so. Now the solar panels are awesome. Unfolded they are about 6ft in length. Once you are done, they fold up into this little hard case with a handle. Very nice and makes for some easy storage. If it can run my air fryer for a couple hours, I will be in hog heaven!

Greg. I have a couple of Bluetti units that have the same rating of 2000W/2048WH. one is the AC200MAX with an added B230 2000W secondary battery attached. The other unit is a discontinued Bluetti EB200 with 2000Wh. That's over 6000Wh of battery power. Here in Southern California the power company (SCE) will shut your power down when there is High winds and your power lines are in High fire area. 5 years ago, I had no Generator at all. I never need one. Well fire season rolled around and SCE shut my power down the day before Thanksgiving and it was not restored until the day after. This led me to look into back up Generators. I never wanted to be in the dark again. The first back up generator I bought was a 12,000w Westinghouse gas/propane generator. This unit works great as long as you have fuel. The down side is that the unit is very Loud. There were two things that led me towards solar generators. One. Solar would be quieter and two was fuel availability. What If the power outage prevents the pumping of fuel? With that in mind I decided to look into solar generators which led me over time to buy the 2 mentioned units. I have 800w of solar panels for charging but I rarely use them. I keep my units charged using my house power. I have done some testing to make sure the solar panels will keep things charged and I think I might need another 400w of panels to do the job. I have never thought about running my show with these battery generators but if the power company did shut me down during show season I think I could run the show with Both battery generators. Based on how well they power all my essentials over night I believe they would power my show for at least 4 to 6 hours a night with no issues. This year I might try and run the Halloween show with both battery generators to see how well they work. More to fallow. Bluetti AC200MAX and B230 expansion Battery set up. https://www.bluettipower.com/products/bluetti-ac200max-1-b230-portable-power-station?_pos=2&_sid=82f9bf2e2&_ss=r&variant=40466976637103 Bluetti EB200. https://www.ebay.com/itm/386228946261?chn=ps&norover=1&mkevt=1&mkrid=711-166974-028196-7&mkcid=2&mkscid=101&itemid=386228946261&targetid=2205194501218&device=c&mktype=pla&googleloc=1013859&poi=&campaignid=19907270866&mkgroupid=150605861994&rlsatarget=pla-2205194501218&abcId=9310008&merchantid=6296724&gad_source=1&gclid=Cj0KCQjwwYSwBhDcARIsAOyL0fiLsKl_3VX1z4DOj5NWST9zPIvfpiKQPGO6l057ZnlpIGtLsCkiLTQaAk8hEALw_wcB Kenny

A good rule of thumb to roughly determine total Watt Hours of power from the solar for a day is four to six hours of full rated capacity (at best). In other words, in ideal conditions, your 400 watt panels MIGHT get 1600 - 2400 WH. That is based on never being shadowed (clouds, trees, anything else), and best possible pointing angle. For some real numbers, I have about 9KW of solar on my house in the Los Angeles area. Looking at this month, my highest production for a day was 39.2 KWH and the lowest was 9.48 KWH. Because all three arrays are mounted flat onto the roof, none are ideally pointed, and there is a tree that shades one of the three arrays every afternoon. The image below shows the orientation of my three arrays (North is at the top). Arrays A2 and A3 are on opposite sides of the garage roof and array A1 is on the house. All are sloped between 15 - 20 degrees (never measured it). The large tree is mostly out of view 20 feet or so to the west of the A3 label. http://newburghlights.org/images/Solar_System.png