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Snowmen

The snowmen were added to our display in 2002. I got the idea after seeing a video by Drew Heckman at the now defunct "Christmas Cave" website of two snowmen having a snowball fight. By 2017, the snowmen were getting rather old and hard to maintain. We initially attempted to fully retire them that year, but after a few requests from the local neighborhood children, we brought them back for the end of 2017 and 2018 resulting in praise from the neighborhood kids! Knowing they could not survive another season, we fully rebuilt them in newer technology for 2019.

Digital Version

During 2019, we complete redesigned the snowmen from the ground up. The snowmen are now made of 5 different pixel grids for a total of 13,256 RGB pixels. This makes the snowman the single largest element in our display. In an attempt to balance cost and quality, the bodies of the snowman have pixels separated by 1" while the other parts of the display use 2" spacing. The snowman leverage 5 volt pixels, about 13 power supplies, and a dedicated Falcon F16v3 controller. A custom Linux program controls the snowman along with the clock. The grids are held up by 1" galvanized pipe and numerous guide wires. There is a pulley system to move the grids into position on the frame.

These new snowmen are a little more flexible than the original design. You see better arm and snowball movement, hats that can be knocked off, the ability to stick multiple snowballs on the nose or on the ground, and a neat "duck the snowball" trick. Every so often, one of them will have had enough and pulls out a big cannon to fire a massive snowball at the other.

For 2020 we gave the snowman a new ability. Viewers can log into our website and select one of 7 different chracters for the Snowmen on the right. Nothing like throwing a snowball at Hans Grubber during the Holiday season!

Original Version

The original snowmen were added to in 2002. While others have build snowmen using wire frames, but I didn't have access to welding materials to build the frame. Instead, I used:

1/2" galvanized pipe
wire fence (2" by 3" spacing).
Wire cloth with 1/2 holes that hold the lights
Zip ties
Rope Light
Mini Lights (35 and 50 count)
A crazy amount of hot glue

The snowmen were really just two pieces of galvanized pipe with 4 feet (1.22 m) of wire fence between them. For the face and arms were more density was needed, wire cloth was added on top of the wire allowing more precise with light placement. These snowmen only required 14 circuits to produces "animation". (Which was important at the the time, because our display used the 320 controller and we had limited circuits.) It worked by lighting up different sets of lights (that represent different arm and snow ball positions) in specific orders. This gave the impression of motion. The circuits for each snowman were:

Arm back to throw
Arm forward to throw
"Splat" in the face
"Splat" on the ground
Upper snowball on the nearest pipe.
Lower snowball on the nearest pipe.
Snowball in the middle pipe.

The body (rope light) and face (mini lights) were static lights that were always powered.

Note: Most of of these pictures were taking before I covered the mini-light cords in black electrical tape to prevent them from being seen. In hind site, I should have used green wire. However, as you can see in the videos the wires not visible at night.

Pictures (Digital Version)

Movies


Greg & Mary Hormann ghormann@gmail.com http://www.thehormanns.net	Copyright © 2000-2023 All Rights Reserved