Jumbo Size New Years Countdown

New Years celebrations tend to get bigger and bigger every year for most people, and [Brian] takes no exception. In order to top his lighted tree of a few years ago, he has concocted a 40’x40′ set of Seven-Segment displays made out of Christmas lights, hung from nearby trees. These displays would start counting down the minutes an hour before the ball drop, and be synchronized with music. Also in the spirit of a New Years party, the music he has chosen is in the form of a Power hour. The control board [Brian] is using also comes with two extra outputs, which he plans to use for the most exciting possible additions: Fireworks and Flamethrowers.

Be sure to check back after New Years to see a video of the device in action. Be sure to Hack, Drink, and Party Responsibly out there.

9 thoughts on “Jumbo Size New Years Countdown

  1. Eh, neato idea. It’s not to clear what hardware he used to run the thing, I’m guessing a Light-o-rama box from his last display.

    As an EE, I would have liked to seen a DIY driver solution, but that’s just me. Then you could have just used 7-seg display driver instead of sequencing out an hour’s worth of digits in software. That must have taken a while to do.

    How to go bigger next year? Maybe laser scan a countdown onto the bottoms of clouds? That’d be cool, and I’m sure a no-no with the law.

  2. Wow, Power Hour is about the lamest drinking game I’ve ever heard of. How about using something likely but irregular and unpredictable as a trigger? Surely someone is doing interviews and speeches during the countdown?

    OTOH sequencing the digits with raw patterns isn’t that hard. RAM is cheap and you can write a script to generate the data statement source code in a few minutes. If I was doing it with only 2 digits I’d have it switch to flashing seconds for the last minute.

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