Cool Additions to This Year’s Christmas Light Show
This year we’ve changed or added quite a lot of cool effects. One of the less obvious includes the move from incandescent to LED flood lights through most of the display. The LED floods are amazingly bright, much smaller in size and cool to the touch. I love these little things.
The coolest addition, however, is a pair of American DJ Elektra LED’s. in the grand scheme of DJ and stage lighting these things are super cheap. They are sounds activated – not DMX controllable. This has been a challenge since I can’t very well blast the music loud enough to trigger them outside. So I ripped the guts open on each of them, added a 1/8″ mono jack soldered to the underside of the built-in Mic on the board. Then made a couple of 50′ 1/8″ mono male speaker wires – one to each unit. I ran these two speaker wires to a “Y” connector. On the other end of the “Y” I rigged up and old cheap computer mic. Now I just place the mic into a calzone case along with a radio picking up the broadcast from the FM transmitter and PRESTO! Crazy cool scanner effect on the cheap. These make Twisted Sister’s version of Oh Come All Ye Faithful rock out it a seriously cool way!
Here’s what they look like in action: