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What's the fastest I can trigger channels?


chuckd

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I'm going way up in channels next year (over 800), and I'm wondering what the upper limit of triggering speed is built into LOR. For example, let's just say I've got 4 Mega Trees that each take 192 channels. At .02 seconds per event, how many channels could I 'step' before the communication bandwidth is exceeded and the resulting sequence won't keep up? Can I single strand spin all 4 trees simultaneously at .02 seconds per step?

I realize the internals of LOR may be proprietary, but it might help to know the baud rate and command length per event... maybe even how it's encoded. Then we might know if we'll run into trouble doing particularly fast sequences.

Kind of deep, but it will definitely help me out in advance.

Thanks guys,

Chuck

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I have no idea of the answer, but would love to see what your schematics look like for building this. I have 96 channels in my whole display. How many colors, strands, etc are you putting up. Also, how are you going to support this. If you have 192 strands of 100 lights, your talking about 125 lbs. If 200 per section your at 250. Must be a strong pole.

James

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I have done as little as 0.01 second for a lights on/off. Whether or not it flashed, I do not know as my eye was not quick enough to see it.

So, after that, I made it my policy to use 0.05 as my flash rate. It can be seen by the naked eye and looks good spinning a tree.

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Remember though, when you send a single command out to turn on and off a channel at .02 seconds, that is probably a very short command. If you send out 100 commands all at once to turn off lights at .02 seconds, that's a pretty long command. If the communications rate were only something like 19.2 K bytes per second, you could run into trouble quickly (it wouldn't stay up with the music). Smaller times like .02 work great with LED's due to their fairly instant on nature, but not so great with regular mini lights that actually burn a filament (that takes time). I don't think I'll go faster than .02 (LOR doesn't really seem to support it directly, either). A full wave cycle is .0167 seconds anyway. With a full wave LED strand, going less than 1/4 of this time would hit a point of diminishing returns anyway, since you'd never hit the voltage peak of the AC power cycle.

I got the basic concept for my giant mega tree from Randall Roberts over on Planet Christmas, who built a similar one this year. Mine will have 64 strands going entirely around, each consisting of one red, one blue and one green. So there are 192 channels all the way around (64 X 3), and this doesn't count the star at the top or anything along the upright. Randall's web site has some pictures of him making his tree. I think I'm going to attach at the top a little different than Randall did, but that's only because it started to get a little tight on him. Here's a link to his site:

http://andrewschristmas.com/mega.htm

The support for this is a Rohn 25G radio tower, just like Randalls. This is the smallest tower that Rohn makes. You can pretty much toss out regular pole supports when you go this tall. Randall had mentioned that if he had the room, he would have done a 100 foot tall tree! I'm not sure my wife would let me climb that high to hang lights, 60 feet is fine for my second year.

These are all LED's by the way. This year I had a 22 foot tree with 72 channels of C6 LED's, and it came out unbelievable (but small). The brightness is so much greater than with regular mini lights. I'm thinking of making this giant tree out of G25's, so that they might appear a bit bigger.

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Chuck. that is over the top.

I am sure that next Christmas the astronauts on the space shuttle will appreciate being able to see your tree :D

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r53142 wrote:

Sometimes I wish I had lot in the country. These city lots are very limiting to how large your display can get.

Amen!
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