It had just been completed in time, as early the next morning “the team” arrived to take the control unit and mount it on the scaffolding along with all the lighting frames being fixed in readiness for connecting up.

It took another couple of days in bitterly cold, icy weather (literally), to connect the wiring of all of the 13 frames’ cables back to the control unit and run in the power supply cable from the Electricity Supply feeder pole 35 metres away, these amounted to 38 cables, 90 cores in all (picture 12).  read more »

The editing results are shown graphically on the PC’s screen in a form that electricians call “ladder logic” networks.

Picture 11 shows an example screen of one such network, the one controlling the four outputs (17-20) for the “Santa Drummer, Alligator & Hearts” at the top centre of the 12 Drummers Drumming display.  read more »

Alongside the building of the unit, it had also been necessary to think about and prepare a programming sequence chart of the intended sequence of animation in readiness to program the PLC. The proposed sequence of actions had been “mulled over” for some time and bit by bit developed into the chart shown (picture 10).  read more »

The most labour intensive part of the build was probably the wiring stage. Picture 6 shows the backplate with the equipment mounted on it, and in the very early stages of wiring up.  read more »

Eventually a suitable programmable unit (“the brains”) was acquired, an old industrial computer, known as a Programmable Logic Controller (“PLC” for short), now made redundant after about 15 years of 24/7 active service, but still in good working order. Yes, even working computers get made redundant these days!

This PLC would be able to hold all the “actions” in a sequential program and switch relays on and off as required.  read more »

It was necessary to know what the combined loading of all these lights would be so that the control equipment and wiring could be suitably sized. However, there was not much forthcoming on this, and so a rough estimation had to be made, which was based on about 15 watts per metre of lighting, and a “character” having about 10-15 metres rope lighting, giving a total load of around 4.5kW when everything was on. After a couple more discussions, most of the other questions had been answered. Also, a  read more »

Even at first sight it looked like another large project, somewhat similar to “The 11 Pipers” but with more lighting elements to control, and luckily without any music requiring synchronising to the lighting animation.

It all started one evening at the beginning of October as, at long last, a bit of good summer weather was being enjoyed, rather late, but better then than none at all!

A phone call was received setting up a meeting with the designer/builders of the Christmas lights frames to discuss “the new one” which was already well under construction.  read more »

Twelve Drummers Drumming was the keenly anticipated light to complete the sequence The Twelve Days of Christmas - here's the story of how the light was designed, built and animated and made its debut for Christmas 2010.  read more »