Christmas 2008–2009 at the Hormanns

2008 was our eighth year for an animated Christmas display. Once again Mary and I had big plans for increasing the size of the display but with two kids, we just didn’t find the time. This year the 320 Circuit Controller completely died. Over the last few years there had been a few problems with some circuits getting stuck on, or turning on when other circuits were turned on, but this year it was really bad with most of the circuits having problems. After spending two hours trying to “fix” the issue by replacing individual chips, we finally just pulled every single chip from the board and put in new ones. (Our belief was that one had gone bad and was burning up new chips that were being put in. That would explain why a new chip started smoking after I replaced it.) Luckily, I had enough spares laying around. Replacing every single chip at the same time worked! As always the LOR Hobbyist boxes worked perfectly.

Although we didn’t make any big additions, there were a few changes this year. First, we changed the software so that the clock could count down to New Years Eve in addition to Christmas Day. We now just replace the word “Christmas” with the next year (2009) on Christmas Morning. It now takes about 15 minutes to make the switch.

Second, we added some new patterns for the bushes to perform. Unfortunately, these were added after the movies were created and don’t show up. :-(

No major changes were made in 2009. Unfortunately, we had to replace some of the controllers that wore out, and do some major repairs to the snowmen. It is hard to believe many of the parts of the display are 10 years old.