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The Porch / Re: What happened to DLA???
« on: August 24, 2021, 10:22:29 pm »Actually, the evolution of Christmas light technology never ends. People like RJ, tbone, rrowan, smeighan and others have been invaluable friends and DLA resources over the years. This is just my perception and may not be factually correct. There may have been disagreement on the direction they wanted to go that led to the split. I know in general RJ wanted to keep everything easy enough for the masses and keep things approachable and compatible. I feel like RJ focused on a design where you couldn't shoot yourself in the foot easily. THe new designs are more flexible ... but you also have to do the math and understand injection and other things to make sure you don't overdo it. I see the pros/cons of both sides. Perhaps that was a source of disagreement ... doing all you can vs doing what you can do without issues/workarounds. I hope nobody got hurt or permanently offended, as I know RJ and David both to be great people! I feel like RJ did so much, it was inevitable burnout would occur or just the desire to focus lives on other things. Totally understandable. Also, I see that this burns out whomever is the leader as any one time. So I saw RJ replaced by David and perhaps dkulp is next ... its amazing how much time and effort and goodwill these RGB pioneers have spent making this possible for the rest of us. dmoore left and founded holidaycoro. I would love to know what RJ has been doing since, as he was my mentor in the hobby, along with Holdman and others back in the day. While David started falconschristmas forums and pixelcontroller.com (The Falcon controllers store) ... I watched as Matt, the Xlights founded, before leaving to work for LOR, worked with Sean to port code from his nutcracker (object oriented sequencing, and auto programming of lights) to combine software from xlights (was a show player, scheduler) into a new nutcracker + xlights = new XLIGHTS that was an object-oriented sequencer that was open source and C++ (I think). Further, David created the FPP (or worked with others) ... and since was taken over by Dkulp ... who ironically is doing a lot of new hot RGB hardware (kulplights) that is competition for falcon controllers. However, I think dkulp and David are on friendly terms and cross sell each others hardware. I never really understand the full story, nor do I really need to ... but RJ really got this hobby going and even was a pioneer in RGB as far as I am concerned. Because David also used pixelnet and Smart String, the falcon line was always pixelnet compatible, which was awesome for those who had SSC(s). I literally still use SSC(s) on my show in 2020 on my neighbors house because the DLA active hub is such a great things ... he simple deploys the active hub to the roof and then plugs everything into it. Because the programming is in the SSC(s), and my neighbor leaves them attached to the light sections ... its plug and play and very fast and easy for him. I have converted my house to using Falcon Diff Controllers fed from a Falcon F16v2 diff rcvr, but I have to plug in certain wires to the correct ports, which isn't hard but its harder than my neighbors setup which he can just deploy and plug in without any requirement of knowing which port to plug into ... well, it doesn't matter. And this year, we had a SSC go bad ... well I have so many old ones laying around, we just swapped the programmable chip from the old into the new ... and boom, new SSC ready to go. Kudos to RJ for keeping this site around as I still reference more than I would like to admit. I still favor the TM1804 bullet notes because power use is 1/2 that of 2811 and cost is only a little more. As far as I know, Ray Wu still sells TM1804 nodes but I haven't bought any for several years or more. THey have been very reliable and its nice to have a show which is 100% TM1804 based and 12v. I am very fortunate to have lived close to Sean and David at a time when they were pioneering the hardware and software for the hobby. The think I see in common with RJ and these folks ... is they were the most giving people I have known and dedicated to the pursuit of the growth of a hobby which brings smiles and joy to people worldwide!! I always recall one of the things RJ said a lot -- which was that he was in this for "the smiles". THat has stuck with me, because at the end of the day ... most people smile when they see these shows and it brightens their days and hearts.
here here Scott! a toast to you sir for such a fine read. i will second everything you just said about RJ and all of the gang. this forum is what made it all happen for me, you were a big part of being there, as well as the rest of the gang. i was just looking into pulling my active hub and some ssc's out for some long runs i'm planning. falcon is great, but still need 110v. ssc and simple cat5, you know the rest.