One of these fixtures can light up the gable peak of the front of the house (where the large star is), and a second one lights up the west side of the house.įor the 2014 season we phased out the Rainbow floods on the garage roof when Tim was able to purchase two more vFloods from a friend who was no longer using them in his display. We are also using a few standard commercial DMX wash fixtures in the display starting in 2011. We replaced them with two commercial units in 2012 which were brighter and run on the DMX protocol. Their last duty was to wash the front of the garage in the 2011 season. In 2012 we phased out the original MR16 spots completely.
The rainbow floods were repurposed for the garage door and garage roof in 2011. They take 12VDC power input and a DMX signal, and are otherwise self contained. Each pair of circuit boards goes inside a fixture. Like the Rainbow floods, we used a gutted halogen work light enclosure to hold the vFloods and vDrives.
They provide for an even brighter and wider color pattern than the Rainbows did in 2010. We used this vFlood on the garage door in 2010, and were so impressed with it that we purchased two additional ones for 2011 to use on the front of the house. Since then we’ve added a lot more DMX to the display, including our North Poles, candy canes, and even our pixel mega tree.
As such, it required a special LOR device called the iDMX to bridge between our standard Lightorama network and the DMX device. DMX is the lighting control standard used at concerts and theatrical events, and this single flood was our first use of it in our display. It’s coupled with a “vDrive”, a special controller that powers the LED’s in a safe (for them) way, and speaks the DMX protocol. However, the vFlood uses a much brighter LED than the Rainbow did, and the colors are truly awesome.
Dmx smart pixel strips mega tree full#
The circuit board of the vFlood looks similar to the rainbow in that it’s a board full of LED’s. The Rainbow floods ran off of the same DC controller as the MR-16’s.Īlso in 2010 we picked up a new flood called the vFlood. In 2011, we once again changed the technology of the lights on the front of the house (keep on reading below), and moved our three Rainbow floods over to the garage – two on the roof, and a third on the garage door (although the door is dark and doesn’t lend itself to being ‘washed’).
The Rainbow’s are true RGB devices, meaning the color mixing is better than with the MR-16 banks. These floods came as kits – basically bags of LED’s and a bare circuit board, that Tim soldered together and placed in gutted halogen work light enclosures. In 2010 we switched to using a new kind of flood, called the Rainbow Flood, on the front of the house. By the 2011 season we were still using two of these fixtures to help light the front of the garage, but had switched to other technologies for the rest of the wash effect. We designed our own weatherproof enclosures for the MR-16 bulbs, and created a detailed how-to on how we did it. Each fixture contained a Red, Green, and Blue spot light and was controlled by a special low-voltage controller to sync them up with the rest of our lights and show. Tim ran across a deal on some of these LED spotlights, and with some guidance from some online friends, proceeded to create several banks of these. The original LED wash fixtures we built in 2008 used LED MR-16 bulbs. A post holding one of our original MR-16 banks (bottom) and a Rainbow Flood (top).
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