So Far......
The Original Christmas lights display looked a bit different from what you see today!
It all began 18 years ago in December 2003 which was Ben's first christmas. (Me) Ben's dad Stuart had a plan to buy a different christmas light every year starting off with a waving Santa (which is still used in the display today). The display slowly grew over the years until 2014 when a 11 year old Ben wanted to try out musical christmas lights. Over the course of a few weeks we built our first controller which was based on a cam-timer and mechanical relays, it could only play jingle bells and music was handled by a separate pcb meaning it was never in time.
In 2018 Ben was doing some reasearch on a saturday morning when he discovered some software (Vixen 2) that was a lighting sequencer which could take the display to a whole new level! Off he went that afternoon to Maplin to buy the components to build the first vixen compatible controller. (A Velleman usb module and a relay board) that was used up until 2020 when we went digital.
2020 the beginning of a digital era
The original PCB and relay setup was starting to show its age after 2 years of turning lights on and off (and with the closure of maplin meant we couldn't get spares). We started to migrate to a digital system. The pandemic really gave me time to focus on this so i come up with a system that could be easily expandable and repairable. Ben was developing lighting controls for his company at the time and decided to move to Artnet and DMX which are protocols in used in the theatre and live events industry. We also moved from mechanical relays to solid state boards which has helped with reliabilty and meant we can start adding RGB and other inteligent fixtures to our display.
The Team
Ben - Head of display and programming
Stuart - Electrical consultant
Dave - Head of mechanical engineering and art department
Supported By: BL Sound & Light + Mervad Electrical