This is a condensed post that will cover the past 2 days up until about 4pm today….

So Thursday morning around 10:45am I sat down to unwrap the new controller I got in the mail on Wednesday. I got it installed in the enclosure with no problems at all. I hooked it up to the computer, Hardware Utility found it fine and I resent the controller ID # to 7 and headed out to install it in the display. Incredibly long story short, that didnt work! I ended up having to disconnect and bring the controller back into the garage not once, but TWICE! Got things working and headed back out to install it again. As I did an older gentleman pulled up and told me how much his family loved the lights and wondered why he couldnt hear the music this year (I havent been broadcasting any yet). I told him about the issues we have been having, showed him the new controller and hoped that it would all be working by Friday/Saturday night. As he drove off, I plugged the controller in and went back to the garage to see if it was working… NOPE! So what I ended up figuring out is that I have a bad RJ45 port on the board, 1 of the 2 that is. Which means this board would have to be the “End of the line”, yet I also found out one of my oldest boards has the same issue… that’s a problem!

So, this morning I find out that a RJ45 Y Adapter would work and help me split the lines. Luckily enough a local computer shop had a couple of them so for $6.95 I had some hope. Got home, hooked it up and I could see ALL 7 controllers! I could even turn lights on to each of them. This was good. The next step was to burn my sequences on a cd from my laptop and move them to my lights machine, so I did. As I was putting that cd in the machine… POOF! It died! Luckily I am pretty good at working on computers, so with an assist to my brother, we believed it was simply the power supply. So I yanked the one out of my desktop inside, installed it and its working!

I am currently running test sequences to see if its all gonna work right. I have seen a few glitches, but things that were fixable… so far. As it gets darker I will be able to tell more.

One step closer…