Arch Fence


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You can click on the pictures on this page for a larger version.

  Arch Fence in 2009.  
     

Sometimes the best display ideas just fall into place.  Our Dancing Arch Fence falls into that category.

Since 2002 when we moved to this home, the front of our display was flanked by a Candy Cane Fence.  The candy cane fence worked well and was a nice display item, but it had the drawback that it was largely not illuminated.  The canes themselves did not light up, and only the lights strung from the large canes did.  This made for somewhat of a 'dark front' to the display, even though the LED Rope Trees helped to brighten things up.  

Also in 2006, we found both a display on the internet, and a second local display, which made use of what they called "lawn arches".  These arches went along the edges of the display, and could change colors, etc. via computer control.  At the same time, another display on the internet came up with what they called "leaping arches":  large arches made up of several segments, each one individually computer controllable so it looked like little spurts of light were floating along the arches.

The idea came to us to try to morph these to concepts together.  As we were considering this, two things fell into place.  First of all, a fellow decorator from California decided to downsize his display, and we were able to get a really good deal on two 16-channel LOR controllers.  We also had a 16-channel board that we had purchased a few years earlier but hadn't yet used, so this gave us a total of 48 new channels available.  At the same time, we were able to get in on a group buy on some LED lights.  As it turned out, we had to buy them in sub-cases, which were 12 strings of lights each.  

Why is all this important?  Because the
  Arch Fence in 2007

Here is another view of our LED Dancing Arch Fence, with most of the arches green, but one red arch visible on the far right.

  
     
plan just fell into place.  We would create 12 arches.  Each arch would have two individual colors, red and green LED lights.  And each arch would contain two of each color, so that we can animate them by "half arches".  So each arch would contain two channels of red, two channels of green, and there are 12 arches, which gave us 48 channels of lights, and 4 cases of LED's would be needed to be ordered.  Later we measured things out and 12 arches almost perfectly fit across our yard.  It just worked out.

We should have taken pictures of the construction of these arches, but we were concentrating so much on getting them made that we didn't.  Each arch is about 11' of grey 1/2" electrical PVC pipe.  The red and green LED's are wrapped around the PVC and wire-tied in place.  Each arch has two plugs at each end to hook into our computer control system.  

After completing the arches, we made some wiring harnesses to more easily connect the 48 plugs into the 48 channels of control.  The computer sequencing can do a lot of neat effects on these arches-- having them change between red and green, having string of arches "chase" down the yard, having a red arch "pour itself" into a row of green arches, etc.  As we did all the sequencing before the display was set up, it was a lot of fun to watch them in action once everything was connected and running.


Arch Fence in 2007

This page was last updated on Monday, December 21, 2009

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