Two things happened this weekend...one bad, one nice

[Jaynee]

First the bad:  Our display was vandalized on Friday.  this makes it two years in a row it has been messed with.  We have it on camera, but they were just outside the well-covered range of our cameras, and so while we could tell they were teenaged girls with long dark hair, the footage is not worth handing over the police.   The xmas lights were off for the night - they drove up around 12:35 a.m. and just sat in front of our house for a minute or so, then drove back further into the neighborhood.  Then at 12:45 a.m. they came back, parked across the street a couple houses up, then came and posed for selfies and videos of the yard.  They then headed back to their car - but for some reason turned back, came into our yard, dismantled a couple of our lawn decorations, then hopped back in their car and drove off.  Very frustrating, and we have already scheduled an electrician to come out tomorrow afternoon to install a motion-sensor flood light on the front of our house.  We have also adjusted our surveillance cameras to ensure better coverage of every corner of our yard.  Between the floods and the better angles of our cameras, we'll be in better shape if they come back.

 

Then the nice:  On Saturday afternoon a gentleman from our neighborhood knocked on our door and said he had a couple questions about our display.  He proceeded to ask me about our power load, how we have everything set up, and asked for advice on his own breakers constantly tripping.  I told him how we have our things spread out across four 15-amp breakers, with no breaker carrying more than 7-8 amps each to avoid overloading.  I showed him the plug covers we use to keep the rain out of our extension cords, and recommended he get a kill-o-watt meter to make sure he's not going over 12 amps on a 15-amp breaker.  We talked about the electrical differences between using incans and LEDs.  He was thrilled with all the information I gave him, and kept saying how much his young sons love coming to look at our display every night.

 

So it was a weekend of ups and downs for us - the disappointment in the girls' actions, but the pleasure of hearing a guy rave about how much he and his family enjoys our display.

[Orville]

Sorry to hear of your bad issue, always sad when some teenage punks have to do stuff like that.  And it's why I usually keep power to all items in my display, not enough to light them, but enough to give someone a nice little harmless jolt if they try and cut wires or grab light strands that may be damp from dew or rain.  

 

And sometimes I will have an overnight animation sequence run on different nights for different times that cycles through my lights.   

 

Knock on wood, haven't had any "humans" vandalize my display, just the idiot neighborhood cats that have pulled a cord from my controller dangles occasionally.   Keeping some or all lights cycling in the display, one never knows if someone might be up and "watching" the display alongside any other security measures one may have in use.

[Jaynee]

That's definitely a thought if the floodlight doesn't provide the kind of coverage we really need (we need the floodlight to light all the way to the sidewalk).

[PaulXmas]

I have been lucky that nothing has gone wrong.

My neighbours lost a wire frame 2 years ago.

I have a temp fence up that surrounds the display (aluminum fence post pounded into the ground with netting and lights attached).

[Jaynee]

I did get permission from our HOA to get install a temporary fence, but once I started pricing it I realized it would be way too expensive.  So instead we just made a "visual" fence using candy canes as posts and hanging lights from cane to cane around the front and sides of the yard.  But that was not enough to stop the errant teens.

 

I like Orville's idea of having the lights randomly go on and off during the night and am strongly thinking about creating that program.  Since our LOR lights are all around the perimeter of the yard, I could have them cycle around pretty seamlessly.

[Dale W]

Lord used to sell a motion detector that could be tied to your display. It turns on, and flood lights can be turned on. May be in the store or not.

[BMurray]

Sorry to hear about that. I hope you can get it up and running again. I have 8 cameras in my front yard pointing in every direction I can think of and signs posted in several locations. I have a camera pointed down the street and the street directly in front of the house to get vehicle info for the police should anything happen. I know it may not stop them but it's a deterrent. A news article today came out in my area that a house in Upland was vandalized with the perpetrator caught on camera stealing lights. Even though there was an excellent view of the person.... no one caught yet. Unfortunately this is a risk of the hobby. One we shouldn't have.

[k6ccc]

That sucks!

 

I've never had anything on my lights damaged or stolen.  I also have security cameras and caught a couple girls my son knows stealing a backpack that belonged to another friend from our driveway a few years ago, and some guy stole an old mattress we had over by the firewood pile waiting for trash day to get rid of.  Had a fight that resulted in quite a bit of blood getting spilled across the street that was about five feet out of camera view.  Because of work as part of my landscaping project a few years ago, I had yellow barricade tape along the sidewalk.  Had it get cut several times.  Finally caught a girl about 6 walking up and cutting it with a pair of scissors.  It was the grand-daughter of a neighbor a few houses down the street.

[B.Y.R.G.]

What's up with all the girl troublemakers..........Isn't boys will be boys?

[lightingnewb]

Do you use "DANGER HIGH VOLTAGE"  and "NO TRESPASSING" signs to deter these kinds of folks?

 

The only thing wrecking our show right now is nature - winds knocking things out of place and rain drenching everything. But lo and behold, everything eventually works itself out.

[Jaynee]

We did make a humorous banner that says, "Don't be naughty - Santa is watching (and so are we)" but we didn't put it up since we hoped that posting on our neighborhood's FB page would be enough.  And for a while it was - we lasted two weeks before the girls (not from our neighborhood) showed up and did something.  So the banner will be hung the same night our motion floodlight gets installed so the message is clear.

 

I'm also working on creating an animation sequence as Orville suggested - I've got a 5 minute clip of the LOR lights slowly fading up and down in a random fashion all around the yard. 

 

Now I just need to figure out how to get the miniDirector to run my main music program for 5 hours and then run the new animation for another 7.  I'm hoping the answer is NOT "create a 12 hour program in your hardware utility."

[k6ccc]

As I said in another thread, running off a computer. Then you can do all kinds of weird scheduling.

[Jaynee]

Unfortunately, I can't run off a computer - my laptop is super old and unreliable, and my desktop is too far away from the garage where the LOR controller is.  I have created a 1-hour random sequence for the late night lights, but I still need to recreate my show, and turn it from a 37-sequence 2-hour show that repeats into a 111-sequence single 6 hour show and then slap on 7 duplicates of the 1-hour random sequence that I created tonight.  For tonight I'm going to save the 1-hour sequence as its own show on a spare 4GB SD card and just swap it out each night this week.  Over the weekend I'll dedicate some time to create the new 118-sequence show that I'll need for the full 12-hour run that I want to do.

[lightingnewb]

Those numbers scare me.

 

Out of 3 people who were sequencing, we were able to produce a 3-song show... for now. There is discussion of adding onto it this year.

 

Additionally, two of us were working/had school... one of those two did 2 of the 3 songs.

 

Granted, this is only our second year doing this. Part of our delay was actually hanging our NEW lights up. But since we upgraded our lights from last year... I think we're going to keep the lights the same for next year (with small tweaking in placement of lawn decorations). Next year we plan to use generally the same channel config and only program NEW songs and as many as we can. We use a small desktop (one of those really under-rated cube looking boxes that is extremely condensed and limited) to control all our lights, so our show can have as many songs as we can fit in a 4-5 hr window.

 

Thanks for sharing... sorry to hear about the bad part of your display... hopefully you can resolve it rationally and come up with a good and permanent fix.

 

Happy Holidays.

[Jaynee]

My numbers aren't scary.  I only have 4 sequenced songs.  I have it set up so that every other song is static, and I cycle through the sequenced songs 5x in a two hour show.

 

So 16 songs are static, and the other 21 are my intro clip and then the 4 songs repeated 5 times each.

 

Clip

Sequence 1

Static 1

Sequence 2

Static 2

Sequence 3

Static 3

Sequence 4

Static 4

Sequence 1

Static 5

Sequence 2

Static 6

Sequence 3

Static 7

Sequence 4

etc.

 

I may do Orville's method for setting up shows and label all the tracks with consecutive numbers and then just upload them all.  That has to be easier.

Edited December 15, 2015 by Jaynee

[k6ccc]

Unfortunately, I can't run off a computer - my laptop is super old and unreliable, and my desktop is too far away from the garage where the LOR controller is. 

 

RS-485 spec says you can go 4,000 feet.  Is your garage that far away?  I assume not!

 

Push comes to shove, buy a computer for the purpose.  My show computer is a lease return refurb I got from TigerDirect.com three years ago for a whole whopping $80.  It's an HP desktop running XP, but it does the job.  I don't even have a monitor, keyboard and mouse hooked up to it.  Always access it remotely using RealVNC.  Couple year old PCs are almost give-away items - far cheaper than even the lowest cost director, and the PC gives far more flexability is show setup.  Personally I can't run a director (even for my year round landscape show), because I need a basic functionality that the directors can't do, but even if I could, I would not even consider using one.

[Vince4xmas]

I too was vandalized two nights ago. Someone cut one of my (4) conductor RGB cables. Interesting that was the only cable cut as (7) more were a foot away? Took me 30 minutes to solder back, heat shrink and tape. The cable they cut had connectors on both ends so repair was done inside.

 

Don't quite get it.

[Orville]

I used a director to do just that when i was using one.   It's not difficult at all, just set the times for each show.   I had 3 or 4 shows running off my director unit, daytime ran from 7am-5:25pm for the Off Hours music, then my actual show started at 5:30pm - 9:30pm Sunday-Thursday, 3rd show was set for Friday and Saturday 'til 10:30pm, then at 10:31pm the overnight animation started for a few hours, usually ran from 9:31pm{after musical show ended} until around 3am Sunday-Thursday, then 10:31pm-3am Friday Saturday, then at 5am I had a show that just turned on only the LED light strands at 40% and cycled my wire frame reindeer until 6:15am.

 

Was actually very easy to do with a director unit.  Like said, I did it for 3 years until I was "forced" to use a computer when my Director died about 2 hours before showtime.   Had to do some real fast learning since I had NEVER used a computer to run a show before, but once I did, I'll probably never go back to a director unit again, but would like to have one just in case I wanted to use it in a location elsewhere if it would be impractical to run a cat5 to that area from the main show controllers, but doubt I'd ever need to do that or use one.  But it's nice to have the option if needed.

 

I bought a cheap laptop, got it at a yard sale for $10!   It needed a little work{keyboard repair} and a new Hard Drive, but once I got it up and running, it was cheaper than a new director by a wide margin.

[Orville]

One of the neighbors in my neighborhood had their decorations stolen out of their yard a couple nights ago, our Security officer told me about it Monday night.   Told me I should watch my items, fortunately I have a neighbor whose security cameras watch not only his yard, but mine as well, and it's caught and helped prosecute a band of thieves that were stealing the A/C units in the neighborhood!

 

Not only that, if they want anything from my yard except the cheap-a$$ed candy canes I have stuck in the ground{$1 store stuff}, they're gonna have to really work for it or destroy it, making it useless to sell, trade or use.   My blowmolds are secured with deck screws through them, many hidden, lights are secured with screw down cable clamps with a host of different styles of screws, my reindeer are staked down with very long tent stakes driven far into the ground and not visible at all.   If someone tries to just pull one up, they're either going to pull their arms out of their sockets or get a hernia trying to grab one and run.    Need a special tool my late father devised for me to get those stakes up out of the ground. LOL

 

And if they cut an light strand wire, they better have on some type of electrical proof protective gloves since power IS ALWAYS flowing through to my controllers and lights, even if they aren't lit!  Just enough to give them a nice little jolt to tell them, do that again and you may get something much worse! LOL

 

Been lucky so far, no problems with stuff being broken or vandalized, plus I'm up and down all night long and watch the neighborhood too, so if I catch anyone in the act of messing with my display, they're probably going to be leaving my display area in an ambulance when I'm done with them!

[bostonchris81]

I also had a disturbance in my yard about a week or so ago . I had a 2 huge wire reindeer in my front lawn that were stolen on a Sunday around 9:00 pm . After a few days heard rumors that a group of high school girls have been going around my town stealing reindeers out of people's yards , some were found and returned others not , so unfortunately mine have not turned up . People just plain old suck sometimes !