Jerry Budelman Posted August 31, 2012 Share Posted August 31, 2012 Hi Folks,I was visitng the 2011 LOR winners forum to get some inspiration and, surprise, I noticed my 2011 display was included! (>128 channels, Jerry Budelman). Wow! However, when I clicked on the link, Quicktime gave me a ? and wouldn't play. I then saved the file and tried to open it with Media Player and it did not recognize the file format or codec (listed as MP4.) The size of the file seems small, about 5MB so I suspect that something is corrupted. Has anyone else been able to open the file? Am I doing something wrong? Thanx for any help...Jerry 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
EARLE W. TALLEY Posted August 31, 2012 Share Posted August 31, 2012 Jerry, I opened it without any problem, it's right below mine. It might take a minute to load then play.Earle Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ron Boyd Posted August 31, 2012 Share Posted August 31, 2012 Opened up for me too. Love your Mega Tree. you wouldn't mind sharing how you did that, would you?Earle, love your Spiral trees Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jerry Budelman Posted August 31, 2012 Author Share Posted August 31, 2012 Well, I just tried again and now it works fine!! Thanx for chasing the gremlins out, guys!Ron, happy to share how I did the mega tree, but please understand that I'm a glutton for punishment........The tree stands only about 9 feet tall and is made in 2 halves so I can hoist it up on the boat and erect it. There are 2400 individual LEDS in the tree, grouped in triads of red,blue and green, or effectively 800 RGB pixels. Each LED is a wide-angle unit from a string of 50 (more on that later). Each discrete triad of LEDs is glued into the rear of a tiny silvered reflector. The reflector is 1/2 of a ping pong ball coated with silver paint and glued to the back surface of a wire mesh (hardware cloth) which in turn is mounted on the (half) tree wood frame. There are 800 such reflectors; 400 on each tree half. The entire array is completely planar e.g. about 3 inches thick and the rotation is simulated by a perspective arangement of the pixels. There are eight sections; four in the "front" and four in the "rear". With the three colors, that makes 24 channels for the tree. While the pixels are not true RGB (they didn't exist when I built this beast), they do color-blend fairly well. The LED strings were originally half wave, so I took them apart and wired them in smaller strings with a full wave rectifier circuit and series resistor calculated to achive about 20ma current per string. The whole tree takes about 100 watts of power with everything on and is seriously bright. There are also about 10 strobe lights buried in the array which are homebrew circuits which fire 3 LEDS in each one of the 10 ping pong reflectors. The strobes are actually dimmable up to a point.This tree was the third incarnation on the boat, so one learns from past efforts..... The tree only weights about 30 lbs per half and has been going strong for 3 seasons now with no failures....knock on wood.Hope this helps.Jerry Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ron Boyd Posted August 31, 2012 Share Posted August 31, 2012 Whew, sounds like a ton of work. How long did it take to do all of that?Results are fantastic though. It's one of the most unique tree I've seen yet. Kudo's!!Very well done indeed.Ron Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jerry Budelman Posted September 1, 2012 Author Share Posted September 1, 2012 Hi Ron,Many thanx for the recognition. It took a LOT of time; I would guess 300 hours or so just on the tree. I'm retired, so I have the time, but even still it's very tedious, but I love to see the kids squeal when they see the show down on the waterfront. The show lasts about 45 minutes (plays twice each night) and includes 6 tunes plus intersegment naratives that explain the technology etc. This year, I'm converting even more of the display to LEDs with the goal of having the entire show, every night, powered by solar energy. This past spring I put a large solar aray on the boat (2200 watts) and it should be able to keep up with demand even during the winter hours. After the conversion, the PEAK draw for all lights should be under 1800 watts and the average far below that.Jerry Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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