Ran a final test of all hardware last night, wanted to share, so here it is.
I have 4 faces measuring 36"X36" at the boards extent. Working from the holidaycoro method, I used rather expensive sheets of dense black plastic, approximately 1/2" thick by the aforementioned 36" square. The hand-drawn sketches were blown up 400% from the 8 1/2 X 11 paper I used, and the resulting copy was then glued to the plastic boards, which I then drilled hundreds of 3/8" holes through for each face. The frankenstein and pumpkin are each 8 channels, with the vampire and skull only having 7. We hot-glued each and every mini incan holder into their respective holes, and the sometimes jagged angle of the bulb seems to add to the effect. 3 layers of a semi-transparent black cloth screen material are stretched across the front, somewhat hiding the 2X6 frame that surrounds each face. I ordered up a Ren8ss and a Ren24ss from Wayne the Thursday before Labor day and they arrived on that Tuesday (tyvm Wayne for the super speedy service), and put them together in about 10 hours time.
I use Papagayo for the lip syncing, and import the phenomes into Vixen using the converter found here on diyc. Doing it this way actually makes the time spent in vixen almost nil, save for fading in/out and adding the blinks to the eyes. An Asus netbook runs the show, with an FTDI usb>rs485 cable I bought from mouser. That cable came bare wire ended, and I soldered the 3 needed wires to a cut end of straight-thru cat5 cable, used a cheap rj-45 female-female coupler, then the crossover cable to the first renard. The installer program from ftdi took literrally only a few seconds and popped up my new virtual com6 port, and vixen easily recognized it. Everything worked well on the first test, except a poor solder joint at one of the opto's current limiting resistor trigger side, and some unexplained short between 2 of the pic's output pins that had 2 channels lighting when either/or was commanded. Diag and repair took only a few minutes, and was back outside setting up the tripod. Hope to add a FM-02 and be up and running this weekend, have alot of songs from last year that shouldn't take long to tweak a little and reimport/sequence, along with of course, the highlight of the show, "This is Halloween".
Without further adieu, enjoy.
I have 4 faces measuring 36"X36" at the boards extent. Working from the holidaycoro method, I used rather expensive sheets of dense black plastic, approximately 1/2" thick by the aforementioned 36" square. The hand-drawn sketches were blown up 400% from the 8 1/2 X 11 paper I used, and the resulting copy was then glued to the plastic boards, which I then drilled hundreds of 3/8" holes through for each face. The frankenstein and pumpkin are each 8 channels, with the vampire and skull only having 7. We hot-glued each and every mini incan holder into their respective holes, and the sometimes jagged angle of the bulb seems to add to the effect. 3 layers of a semi-transparent black cloth screen material are stretched across the front, somewhat hiding the 2X6 frame that surrounds each face. I ordered up a Ren8ss and a Ren24ss from Wayne the Thursday before Labor day and they arrived on that Tuesday (tyvm Wayne for the super speedy service), and put them together in about 10 hours time.
I use Papagayo for the lip syncing, and import the phenomes into Vixen using the converter found here on diyc. Doing it this way actually makes the time spent in vixen almost nil, save for fading in/out and adding the blinks to the eyes. An Asus netbook runs the show, with an FTDI usb>rs485 cable I bought from mouser. That cable came bare wire ended, and I soldered the 3 needed wires to a cut end of straight-thru cat5 cable, used a cheap rj-45 female-female coupler, then the crossover cable to the first renard. The installer program from ftdi took literrally only a few seconds and popped up my new virtual com6 port, and vixen easily recognized it. Everything worked well on the first test, except a poor solder joint at one of the opto's current limiting resistor trigger side, and some unexplained short between 2 of the pic's output pins that had 2 channels lighting when either/or was commanded. Diag and repair took only a few minutes, and was back outside setting up the tripod. Hope to add a FM-02 and be up and running this weekend, have alot of songs from last year that shouldn't take long to tweak a little and reimport/sequence, along with of course, the highlight of the show, "This is Halloween".
Without further adieu, enjoy.
