Christmas 2002 at the Hormanns

This is our second year for an animated Christmas display. This year a lot of time and money was spent on controller hardware. The switch over to the new 320 Circuit Controller was more time consuming than planned, but this will give us the capacity to add a lot more lights in the future.

Our display was featured in a story on AroundCinci.com (Unfortunately the website is now defunct.)

This year we added the count down clock as well as the snowmen. The clock has been more popular than expected (which is good because it is more complex than viewers probably realize.) I got the idea of the clock — which counts down the number of seconds until Christmas — from a co-worker. It works similar to a standard digital clock radio. Each of the 7 digits is made up of seven segments. By lighting up different subsets of segments, all 10 digits (0–9) can be produced. Sounds simple, but this means that 49 circuits had to be built as well as 49 strands of lights hung in the correct alignment to produce the effect.

The snowmen were a little easier to construct (though I wish I had done it differently because the wires that should be hidden tend to show.) The snowmen only require 16 circuits and produce “animation” by lighting up different sets of lights (that represent different arm and snowball positions) in specific orders. This is a modified version of Drew Heckman’s design.