a plastic bag — to tape up the sides of the face front to
reduce exposure to the elements. I live in southern
California where it rains very little; we don’t really have
‘weather.’ Finally, attach the face front to the light box
with something like eye hooks and bungee cords. Or, if
you’re short on time, duct tape will work its magic.
Electronics
Setting Up the Raspberry Pi
In the past, it used to take a desktop computer and an
expensive controller in order to run holiday light shows.
Electronics have gotten much cheaper and more
powerful since the first animated light shows, so it’s
easier to get started.
Our animated display will be controlled by a
Raspberry Pi (RaspPi for short). Even though it’s
only $35, it’s a full Linux computer (Figure 9). There
are several different versions of the RaspPi: A, B,
and B+. The version that we need to use here is
version B, as it has a built-in Ethernet port and more
RAM. The B+ version should theorically work as
well, but at the time of this writing the B+ had been
announced and not released, so I was not able to
test it.
The software that will be installed on the RaspPi
is a wonderful software package called Falcon Pi
Player (FPP), programmed by the talented Chris
Pinkham. The software is available from
http://falconchristmas.com. In order to install FPP,
The USB drive will be used to store the animations and
music. The RaspPi is fairly particular in how the SD card is
formatted for its operating system. The SD card needs to
have the format size adjustment off. This is something that
Windows 8.1 has some difficulty doing. Fortunately,
there’s a utility available by the SD Association called
SDFormatter. The utility was specifically created for
formatting external storage like SD cards. It’s available
from www.sdcard.org/downloads/formatter_4.
Unfortunately, I found this utility is also particular about
48 September 2014
FIGURE 9.
Raspbery Pi.
FIGURE 10. Raspber y Pi
connectorschematic.