Anyone else trying out the new Firefly units?

[Duke]

Here's a pic with the FireFlys wrapped around thinwall PVC in the spiral fashion I mentioned. I only need to use 8 zipties with this and if you rotate the tubing they will all point up. The spiral helps to relieve tension on the pixel housing also.




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[Duke]

Here's a shot of my "test stand" for the arches.

It's made from a 2 X 4 with 2 pieces of 1/2 inch by 12 inche long all thread inserted into the 2 X 4 aat 6 feet apart. The arch slips nicely over the all thread and make a perfect 1/2 circle at 6' apart.


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[Paul Roberson]

Duke,

Very nice job! I like them!

Wonder what the would look like if you painted the pvc red. Make candy cain arches out of them.

Nice idea on the wrap around.

[Duke]

Thanks!

I have red duct tape that I was going to spiral wrap around the PVC but time didn't allow for it. It would look like a candy cane then with the red tape spiraling in between the pixels and their wires.

Next year when I surround my property line with these.

I have some ideas for some vertical and horizontal applications too.

(Duke starts plunking spare change into piggy bank)

[Paul Roberson]

Duke wrote:

(Duke starts plunking spare change into piggy bank)

Spare Change??? When do you plan on adding more to your display? 2012?

[thebaronn]

so, it is 12:20am and i just finished my mega arch and I decided to turn everything on and see if the breaker pops.......and it looks good so I also decided to toot my own horn and take this picture which actually came out really well.

I think I'm finally done.....

Maybe....

I need a bigger yard!!!


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[Duke]

Paul Roberson wrote:

Duke wrote:

(Duke starts plunking spare change into piggy bank)

Spare Change??? When do you plan on adding more to your display? 2012?

I already have over 22,000 lights.
It was over 30,000 but I cut back when I replaced my 4 arches with 2100 lights each and went with the FireFlys 'cause CDI's lights kept toasting on me. (They still are)

I will have more FireFlys next year. Probably in the form of trees too.
I may try to make a Marty Fan out of them as well.

I still need a bigger yard.

I'm re-doing my landscape this summer to make more room for lights.

Here's another shot of my house.



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[Duke]

And yet another

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[tboerjan]

Nice displays everyone ! I am alittle in awe and wondering how you guys got your music sequenced so quickly. Are you just doing basic color changes, cut-n-pasting,...

I haven't had time to do much of anything since getting my display up. Planning and thinking for next year. Trying to get a good video in between 20 and 30 degree nites.

[Duke]

I had sequences already done using 7 channel arches that had Red, Green, and White for a total of 21 channels. Converting over to the FireFlys wasn't all that bad except if you wanted white you need to sequence it 3 times and yes, I just stuck with basic colors Red, Green, Blue and White.

[thebaronn]

tboerjan wrote:

Nice displays everyone ! I am alittle in awe and wondering how you guys got your music sequenced so quickly. Are you just doing basic color changes, cut-n-pasting,...

I haven't had time to do much of anything since getting my display up. Planning and thinking for next year. Trying to get a good video in between 20 and 30 degree nites.

Well first off, a lot was just added to last years sequences. I did plan on completely revamping a few sequences, but I just didnt have time.

And also, I use the tapper wizard, I DO NOT break the song into tenths or anything like that. That makes it very easy to make sure the the lights go along with the music (1/4, 1/16 notes and so on, I only break a few things into 1/32 but that if for my big arch and mega tree) I would break it down further to acomodate the 16 pixels on a firefly, but they stick, so I gave up on that.

There is cut an paste going on (if you want a certain area to only be on the down beat or up beat for the whole song and want to continue it for a certain length of time)

Of course if you know the song in and out, that helps. But the biggest help is if you actually LOVE the song.

I loved this song:

This is Halloween by Marylin Manson. Not to toot my own horn, but.... It took me only 2 hours and 55 minutes to sequence it with the talking pumpkin and everything. 81channels

[tboerjan]

I do totally agree with you on the song(s) selection and sequencing you must be IN to that song, but being musically challenged myself, it takes me a lot longer to sequence songs.

I have also started to try to do videos when I can find them for my music as well, also a challenge.

The FF units I am trying to wrap my head around. Even sequencing them I have thought of two good ways to approach it. 16 red, green and blue channels or one red, green and blue channel, repeated 16 times. Which is handier to use - seeing what is going on with all the reds, greens, & blues. Or focusing on one channel to get the exact color combo you want by having all three colors right on top of each other...

Which is better, which is faster, easier, etc to sequence until and if LOR incorporates something into S2 and that may not happen for awhile if ever.

Until it does, can a few of us at least come to a consensus as to the best way to do this. Than at least our FF sequences will have some degree of standardization and inter-changability.

Does this make sense - Duke, Paul and thebarron?

[Paul Roberson]

tboerjan wrote:

I do totally agree with you on the song(s) selection and sequencing you must be IN to that song, but being musically challenged myself, it takes me a lot longer to sequence songs.

I have also started to try to do videos when I can find them for my music as well, also a challenge.

The FF units I am trying to wrap my head around. Even sequencing them I have thought of two good ways to approach it. 16 red, green and blue channels or one red, green and blue channel, repeated 16 times. Which is handier to use - seeing what is going on with all the reds, greens, & blues. Or focusing on one channel to get the exact color combo you want by having all three colors right on top of each other...

Which is better, which is faster, easier, etc to sequence until and if LOR incorporates something into S2 and that may not happen for awhile if ever.

Until it does, can a few of us at least come to a consensus as to the best way to do this. Than at least our FF sequences will have some degree of standardization and inter-changability.

Does this make sense - Duke, Paul and thebarron?

I have been just working with red, green, blue, and white for this year. I have mine set up in the 16red, 16greed ,16blue. I have not thought of doing a 1r,1g,1b and so on set up. I think I may set up a track with my FF set up this way and see how it looks and how it works. It may very well be easier when working with some color other than the 4 I am using. I think it may be helpful to have both set ups available for sequencing.

I started doing my sequencing as soon as I ordered FF. I had lots of programming to do for this year. I had to change all my AL routines over to LOR. That turned out to be pretty time consuming.:shock:

It would be nice for LOR to incorporate some kind of color changer for FF. Not sure that will happen though.

I actually use about 21 tracks now. I am sure one more won't hurt.

[thebaronn]

Paul Roberson wrote:

tboerjan wrote:

I do totally agree with you on the song(s) selection and sequencing you must be IN to that song, but being musically challenged myself, it takes me a lot longer to sequence songs.

I have also started to try to do videos when I can find them for my music as well, also a challenge.

The FF units I am trying to wrap my head around. Even sequencing them I have thought of two good ways to approach it. 16 red, green and blue channels or one red, green and blue channel, repeated 16 times. Which is handier to use - seeing what is going on with all the reds, greens, & blues. Or focusing on one channel to get the exact color combo you want by having all three colors right on top of each other...

Which is better, which is faster, easier, etc to sequence until and if LOR incorporates something into S2 and that may not happen for awhile if ever.

Until it does, can a few of us at least come to a consensus as to the best way to do this. Than at least our FF sequences will have some degree of standardization and inter-changability.

Does this make sense - Duke, Paul and thebarron?

I have been just working with red, green, blue, and white for this year. I have mine set up in the 16red, 16greed ,16blue. I have not thought of doing a 1r,1g,1b and so on set up. I think I may set up a track with my FF set up this way and see how it looks and how it works. It may very well be easier when working with some color other than the 4 I am using. I think it may be helpful to have both set ups available for sequencing.

I started doing my sequencing as soon as I ordered FF. I had lots of programming to do for this year. I had to change all my AL routines over to LOR. That turned out to be pretty time consuming.:shock:

It would be nice for LOR to incorporate some kind of color changer for FF. Not sure that will happen though.

I actually use about 21 tracks now. I am sure one more won't hurt.

I hear that aurora has some sort of swatch that you can pick the firefly color from.

That would be great and all, but I find it pretty cool to program in S2.

So far I use RGB, Purple, yellow aquamarine but i do get some pretty cool results. working on

chartreuse(100% red 60%green)

violet (100%blue 60%red)

magenta (100%red 60%blue)

I initially thought it would be 100%/50% on each of these to get the inbetween colors (violet= purple + blue= red + blue + red= a 2:1 ratio of red to blue)

But I find that you have to eyeball it using the d-light hardware and hope for the best. To get the above numbers my and my wife agreed when a certain color was reached and wrote it down. But our version of each color varies greatly, lol. (apparently I have no taste)

Here is a screen shot of one of the cool things i did by accident. My sequences are broken down into 1/16 notes (each individual beat is broken into 4 sections) So unit 14.1 is on for the first 3 sections and then off for 2. Then I staircase them down 5 rows to units 14.5. I did this in the first 5 rows only. Then if you look down the line at any point (after the initial 3 sections) if you make a 5X5 square so to speak you get a very nice repetitive thingy. So then I take that and copy and paste for the whole unitvertically and horizontally and i get the picture down below. Not it looks simple but the effect is to the beat each pixel cycles through a different color 4 times. Theycolors range from red, blue, green, yellow, purple white, and aquamarine. I did this 5X5 for 2 reasons:1 it is an odd number and fireflys are even number pixel so it will cycle through each pixel. 2 5 (3on and 2 off)gives the ability that some times two main colors will be off to show the reds or the blues or the greens. And afdter all of that, it was not perfect, I messed up on some of the copy and pasting, but i did like the end result so i left it the way it was.

Did that make any sense??


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[Paul Roberson]

Cool pattern.

So I had replaced my flickering pixel strings with the replacement strings I got Fri.

Everything went fine. The WOW was back. We got a little rain over night. When I got up this morning. One of the strings I did not replace was on white pixle 7-16 and one of the replacement strings was flickering!!!! It would flicker thru different colors and sometimes just go to white on pixles 6-16.

The above pixle numbers may not be exactly as I was too pissed to really care. I just unplugged them and came back inside.:X

Sometime today I plan on plugging them back in and when the start doing it again I will look into the problem futher.

[tboerjan]

Well, I'm feeling better about my initial way of setting up my own FF. Looks like we each came to the same conclusion that is to keep all the reds, greens and blues together for sequencing purposes. I do like the "random" method to show off the diferent color combos you can get with FF and I also think that fades with shimmer and twinkles in the background would be a nice effect. Just need to try it.

So are we in agreement about the method to sequence the Fireflys? I think we can at least try to make this a standard amoung LOR users when and if any or all of us share/trade sequences or portions of them (the FF parts).

The only other wildcard I can think of is timings. I pretty much use a tenth of a second as my time because I was told that is the smallest unit that a bulb will "light up" for. As I said though, I am musically challenged, as far as the tapper and the time I need to complete a song. I also, don't have the number of channels as some of you. 48 channels a pop for the FF's means alot of sequencing for those puppies...

Has anyone tried programming the same id number into multiple units or is everyone using different numbers?

[thebaronn]

Paul Roberson wrote:

Cool pattern.

So I had replaced my flickering pixel strings with the replacement strings I got Fri.

Everything went fine. The WOW was back. We got a little rain over night. When I got up this morning. One of the strings I did not replace was on white pixle 7-16 and one of the replacement strings was flickering!!!! It would flicker thru different colors and sometimes just go to white on pixles 6-16.

The above pixle numbers may not be exactly as I was too pissed to really care. I just unplugged them and came back inside.:X

Sometime today I plan on plugging them back in and when the start doing it again I will look into the problem futher.

I had that same problem the night I took the photos. It rained just a little (it has rained a lot more in the past with my fireflys) and on some strands 9-16 was flickering white and 1-8 on others. I tried to run a sequence and it was all jacked up. So I turned EVERYTHING off and waited 5 minutes (easy when your electrical system sucks and only have one 20amp breaker to use). Then switched the breaker back and it worked perfectly....go figure.

[thebaronn]

tboerjan wrote:

Well, I'm feeling better about my initial way of setting up my own FF. Looks like we each came to the same conclusion that is to keep all the reds, greens and blues together for sequencing purposes. I do like the "random" method to show off the diferent color combos you can get with FF and I also think that fades with shimmer and twinkles in the background would be a nice effect. Just need to try it.

So are we in agreement about the method to sequence the Fireflys? I think we can at least try to make this a standard amoung LOR users when and if any or all of us share/trade sequences or portions of them (the FF parts).

The only other wildcard I can think of is timings. I pretty much use a tenth of a second as my time because I was told that is the smallest unit that a bulb will "light up" for. As I said though, I am musically challenged, as far as the tapper and the time I need to complete a song. I also, don't have the number of channels as some of you. 48 channels a pop for the FF's means alot of sequencing for those puppies...

Has anyone tried programming the same id number into multiple units or is everyone using different numbers?

You reminded me of something. With the fireflys I create my own shimmer (only because I was only able to shimmer white, red, green, and others, but i wanted a shimmer that went through the color spectrum so to speak). You know everytime it blinked, it came on a different color..

And all my fireflys have different unit IDs. I figure it is easier to cut and paste than to change the IDs on these babies(the way d-light does it is lame, IMO) I know one would say well once you ID it, you are done, well, I know that next year Im gonna want to change the IDs (I started my FF IDs at 11-13, 14-16, 17-19, 20-22, 23-25) Its and OCD thing. I have to have all my LOR controllers 1st....then Fireflys...the DMX bs which i didnt hook up this year. And if I add more controllers (one a month, thats a good thing to shoot for:cool:) i will run out of room. It would be different if it had a box ID that you could look up with their hardware and then attached a LOR network ID to it......

But thats just my madness.

[Paul Roberson]

If these things don't stop that damn flickering I will not have to be concerned with the easiest way to program them anymore.

So far the WOW factor for me with these has been short lived. Maybe they would work better if I just left them set up in the living room:X

Good thing I got mine in the pre-buy at $5 cheaper each, and didn't have to pay the full "I expect these to work price":shock:

[Duke]

I share your pain Paul.

My excitement over the new strings lasted one night.

1 of 4 now have the dreaded flicker-osis disease.

Maybe if we wash them in gasoline and then dry them with a match?

Just kidding.