Christmas on Manor Lights are on sale!

[Ponddude]

Before I introduce our new products I think it is important to explain to everyone how I work things. I run these events away from a dedicated forum so I am not stuck with their rules. I don't think people should be stuck with the silly ideas of one. I do not sell these lights for a profit. In fact, all prices are rounded to the nearest cent, so I actually only make a few pennies on each light that is sold. I do this for the fun and the enjoyment of all parties involved. For those of you that have purchased from me before, this year you will see things are a little different. Demand for the lights last year was incredible and I certainly could have never imagined how popular they would have been. All that paperwork on my end really was a headache so over the winter I upgraded my site with a store front. Now you can create an account, track your orders and contact me easily all from a simple to use webpage. I also have a database supporting the site so I can keep track of who agrees to the terms and conditions. All of this makes things much easier for you, as well as me. www.christmasonmanor.com/store

Now, enough of the house keeping, let’s get into the good stuff! At the end of last year we sent out a survey to get your feelings on the lights. Thank you to all of those who participated. The good news is, WE LISTENED! Hopefully the changes we made to our existing lights and the new lights we are introducing really meet your expectations as they have met mine!

Our 2010 Product Line:

Blizzard 9, Blizzard 12, Blizzard 20: Last year we revolutionized the industry by introducing the first ever Do-It-Yourself friendly LED snowfall tube. The main drawback was that we only had one size. This year we are introducing a 9" version, featuring 3mm LEDs and a 20" version! Now you can really impress the neighbors with all the different size snowfalls you have! (Blizzard 12 is still available for shipping now)

Blizzard DMX: Take complete control of your Blizzard! No longer does the idea of, "Set it and forget it" apply. Now, through any sequence editing software that outputs the industry standard DMX protocol, you can control the speed and delay settings of your lights. No need to worry about going outside to switch the settings, do it with just a click of the mouse. Standard Cat-5 cable easily connects the lights together and with the addition of the Blizzard Injector you can add power and the DMX signal through the same cable! (Please notw the addition of a DMX adapter is necessary like the iDMX or Lynx Dongle.)

Blizzard Injector: Easily add power to your Blizzard DMX lights with this extremely easy to build and inexpensive device. Add a DMX signal to the input side, 12 volts DC to power connector and the output side will easily power and control as many Blizzard units as your power supply can handle!

Rainbow Wall Runner: You asked for it, you got it! The biggest suggestion we received last year was to make the Rainbow Wall Runner brighter and the red color darker. We searched high and low and found a new supplier of LEDs. The light output is higher which makes the lights brighter. We also added two additional red LEDs to really give the red a POP! A new board design makes is more energy efficient and they produce even less heat than before. With the addition of the Rainbow Brainyou can simply “plug and play” any of the Rainbow devices for a brilliant, million color lights show!

Rainbow Flood Light: Want a lot of light from a small lighting source? The Rainbow Flood Light is perfect for you! Use this light to light up the whole wall of your house. Use it light up a tree. Use it to light up the walkway. The possibilities are truly endless. Easily control this light via the Rainbow Brain or any DC card to really take control of your lighting needs!

Rainbow Brain: This device is our most advanced piece of hardware to date. The Rainbow Brain allows you easily control any of the current or future releases of our Rainbow line of lights. Industry standard DMX protocol is sent and received via this small and efficient device so you can easily add it to your existing DMX network. 5 separate outputs let you control any combination of the lights you can think of. Imagine the possibilities of having 5 Rainbow Wall Runners all doing different things at different times. Connect up to 5 Rainbow Wall Runners and/or 2 Rainbow Flood Lights on each of the 5 outputs to really take control of your display.

We are still developing a lot of new products that could be released this year as well, so we will keep you posted. Right now the firmware for the Blizzard DMX and Rainbow Brain is currently in beta testing. As soon as I am happy with it, there will be loads of videos of all the lights in action.

Have a question? Hop on over to our Forums that are specifically there for discussions on our products. You can check it out at www.christmasonmanor.com/forum. Also, do not hesitate to send me an email at greg@christmasonmanor.com.

Photos and prices of all the new products and lighting devices have been posted in the store at www.christmasonmanor.com/store

Very preliminary manuals are in development and will be posted on the support page very soon. www.christmasonmanor.com/support/support.htm

The "COOP" is scheduled to run from Tuesday, March 23, 2010 until April 19, 2010. All products will be ordered at that time will remain in stock for most of the year. When you go to the store you will see that it shows "0 Available" on most of the products. This is because you will order them now and shipment will be sometime between April and May. After May, most, if not all of the lights will be in stock, so don't feel like you have to rush into the lights now.

As always I am here to help you out. Please let me know if you have any questions and I will be happy to help you out.

[Ponddude]

Ok everyone, I just wanted to give everyone an update on the lights.

People have been ordering up a storm, which is great! I am glad everyone is interested in the lights. A good majority of the most popular lights have been ordered. Most of the PCBs are in stock, which some still in production. Parts are on their way to me as well. As things start to come in, I will start to fill the orders for people. I will also than update the quantities in the store so people can order throughout the year.

I have been getting a lot of questions on the Flood Light, the Wall Runner and Blizzard. I will try and give a general explanation here, but again, please do not hesitate to send me and email or post in our forums dedicated to these lights.

www.christmasonmanor.com/forum

The Flood Light has proven the most popular light this year. The light consists of 54 Superflux LED's; 18 of each color. The light output is far greater than what I had originally anticipated, which is good news. I put together a page on my site that shows a bunch of pictures of the light's main colors. (Red, green, blue and all 3 mixed for white) This was the version 1 board, and the version 2 board will have a brighter red color. It will also have 2 Cat-5 connections on the board. On that webpage I did a comparison of a green, 150 watt incandescent floodlight compared to the green on Rainbow Flood. The lights were right next to each other (about 18" away from the wall) and you can clearly see that Rainbow Flood Light is much brighter! Sorry for not having the other colors, but I haven't used flood lights in my displays in years and had to search just to find the socket! There is also a video of the light in action. Fading, twinkling and just plan ole' showing off.

http://www.christmasonmanor.com/rainbowfloodlight/rfl.htm

Here is the video:
http://vimeo.com/10836199

The Rainbow Wall Runner is just like last year's light. There were some electrical changes to the board, but nothing to concern anyone. It will still work with the lights you got last year, so don't think you need to replace all of those. We redid the resistors to help reduce the heat build up on this board, which is version 2. We also added 2 more red LEDs to help brighter up the red color. I also changed the manufacturer of the LEDs this year, so they are a little brighter than they were last year.

Blizzard is also exactly the same as it was last year. A lot of people wanted different sizes, so we added a 9" version (which uses 3mm LEDs) and a 20" version. They still operate the exact same was as the original Blizzard, which was 12".

Here is a video of them in action:
http://vimeo.com/9298572

Tonight I took the time to upload a lot of stuff onto my site. All the manuals, user guides and data sheets have been uploaded to the support page on my main site and in the store you can download the documents right from the product's page.

As always, if anyone has any questions, please let me know. Things are going along nicely and I will be shipping a lot of your stuff soon. Feel free to contact me at greg@christmasonmanor.com

[Ponddude]

Just a reminder to everyone that the official COOP/pre-sale ends tomorrow afternoon. If you want to guarantee getting some of these lights or controllers, now is the time to get your order in. Most of the components are in and just waiting on the PCBs. Everyone should have the pre-order stuff by the middle of May at the latest!

Feel free to ask me any questions!

[Ponddude]

Just wanted to give everyone an update on the lights.

To begin, I want to thank everyone for participating in the initial sale. Several rounds of PCBs were ordered on most lights. To date, every order has shipped except a bunch that ordered the Rainbow Brain. The Brain's firmware is just being finalized this week and those boards will ship out in the coming week.

The Rainbow Flood Light was more popular than even I could have imagined. Over 300 of the lights were initially sold. The demand for assembled floods was enormous and now I am going to have the assembled lights made in Malaysia from my supplier. Assembled lights should be here in about 3 weeks.

The most important news is that all the remaining quantities of the initial sale have been added to the store. Feel free to order away and in most cases the lights will ship out the same day.

As always, feel free to contact me with any questions.

[morrisonstreet]

Please help out this technology challenged guy here!

I read through the manual but don't quite understand how the rainbow products work. I get that you hook a cat5 cable to them (I of course use LOR products). So to make a floodlight work with all the colors, how many channels are needed? It seemed to me that you needed 1 channel for every primary color and then used multiple channels for other colors. Seems like a lot of channels used for one light, so I thought maybe I got it wrong.

[edvas69]

morrisonstreet wrote:

Please help out this technology challenged guy here!

I read through the manual but don't quite understand how the rainbow products work. I get that you hook a cat5 cable to them (I of course use LOR products). So to make a floodlight work with all the colors, how many channels are needed? It seemed to me that you needed 1 channel for every primary color and then used multiple channels for other colors. Seems like a lot of channels used for one light, so I thought maybe I got it wrong.

I have got a few of the rainbow floods and rainbow wall runners. for a small light they pump out a lot of colour, im very pleased with them.

The rainbow light range run on 12VDC so you would require a DC controller board (LOR DC CMB16D http://store.lightorama.com/cmdedcca.html) to run these lights and a 12 VDC power supply. The lights take up 3 channels 1 each for the primary colours (RGB), with that you can then create all the colours of the rainbow including white by mixing these colours in different ratios.

You can daisy chain these lights together or you can use them individually, but for each individually controlled light it will require 3 channels, which in the end is not a bad sacrifice for being able to create every colour you wish. The cat 5 cable is used because its cheap and easily available, the floods themselves draw very little current at 12VDC and you could easily run several of these on the on set of RGB channels.

Now to sequence these lights in LOR S2 you would vary the intensities of the red, green and blue channels to get the desired colours that you want. LOR will eventually come out with a RGB tool sometime this year to make this easier or if you cant wait you can always take a look at Lightshow Pro 1.7 demo which makes controlling and sequencing RGB lights and CCRs a breeze.

I hope that clears up what you needed to know

[morrisonstreet]

Hmmm, so I can't run it from my LOR1602W?

I thought it said on their website that it got power from the cat5 cable. So I wouldn't run cat5 from the LOR1602W for power and sequencing?

[edvas69]

morrisonstreet wrote:

Hmmm, so I can't run it from my LOR1602W?

I thought it said on their website that it got power from the cat5 cable. So I wouldn't run cat5 from the LOR1602W for power and sequencing?

The cat5 cable is only used as a cheaper alternative to normal cabling it does not connect to any network at all, just to the channels of a controller. The controller you have is an AC switching controller which will not control DC power

There is another option you could always run small 12VDC wall warts after the controller to drive each channel, but that would require a 12vdc wall wart for each channel used, but you would be able to use your current controller.

[morrisonstreet]

In the pdf user manual for the rainbow flood it says,

Power Connections
Power is supplied to the unit via a Cat-5 cable.

So that's confusing to me.

[Ponddude]

Sorry I missed this post. Let me help clear up some of the confusion here.

First off, you are thinking of the Cat-5 cable in its normal sense, which is a data cable. For the application of the Rainbow Lights, we use it as a power cable. Why? Well we have the ability to power up to 4 different channels from one single, cheap cable. If you are using the DC controller you need to make your initial connection by cutting off one end of the cat-5 cable. The wires get connected to 3 channels of the controller, just like edvas69 said. The other end of the cable gets connected directly to the light. Than daisy chaining is done with stand cabling. No data signal is sent through the cabling, just power for the lights.

Now, some people last year used their AC controllers, whether the 1602 or the PC controller, and transformers plugged directly into the outlets of controller. However, I strongly do not recommend this. Transformers are ment to have full power all the time. Varying the power over and over will all but certainly kill the transformers very quickly.

Another option we introduced this year is the Rainbow Brain. This is a DMX based controller that allows you to just plug the lights directly into the Brain for a simply plug-n'-play device. However, because it is a DMX controller, you need to use the iDMX to create the DMX universe. If you don't plan on adding other DMX things to your display, this may not be the best option for you.

Hopefully this helps a little bit.

[morrisonstreet]

Thanks for clearing that up. It sounds like a great product, but way too involved for me. If I could just plug it in and use it with my LOR I would definitely buy these.

[huskernut]

I just got around to installing my wall runners (4) on my house yesterday because I wanted to do some red white and blue for memorial weekend. I can say that installing them in florescent tube protectors just above the garage doors and running the 4 cat 5 cables to the DC controller really was not as much work as I thought it would be.

For power I converted an old PC power supply to provide the 12 volts and got to experiment for the first time with running the controller in standalone mode. I am very pleased with the product and it is easy to run.

Now I need to start assembling my rainbow floods. It still would be great to have a standalone controller to just dial in the color you want for landscaping purposes.

Great Product at a great price.

Rick