Fairground lighting controllers.
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- Опубликовано: 11 сен 2024
- For some random reason I ended up repairing fairground lighting controllers when I was younger (and still do from time to time.) The systems were generally not very well designed and I inevitably ended up building a new system that evolved rapidly into a neat modular one that ended up being used in many British and American rides and themeparks.
Although I don't build controllers any more due to the downturn in the British ride industry, I still have some of the original boards I used which are kept as spares for existing customers.
This video is an insight into how they worked and interconnected.
"The dark side of big clive"
>Lighting controls
Good one
Engineered to be safe, reliable and to last. And with serviceability in mind. Excellent workmanship Clive. Thanks for showing us :-)
It would be awesome if you recorded an out-and-about video at a carnival pointing out possibly some of your controllers in action and the kinds of lighting patterns your controllers produced.
Yes I was just thinking the same thing.
also has he ever produced any controllers that are designed for the US market?
or that would have an option of course with possible component changes?
such as different value for the current limiting resistor for the neons?
possibly a different power transformer if that Transformer does not support both 120 volt AC and 240 AC as well.
Sorry can't really tell from the video at this point if that Transformer would have that capability AKA either a tap or two 120-volt primaries.
which of course would be wired in series or parallel for voltage changes.
Also something on that with Transformers that have two isolated 120-volt warnings to be wired in series or parallel for voltage selection 120 and 240 that is.
Would be feasible to use one of those Transformers what's the two isolated windings for voltage selection.
akka to 120 volt windings if you were not using the Transformer heavily on the secondary and needed a not a lot of current but some isolated 120 volts AC.
Would that work to do it that way.
Although it would be to use a higher current AC Transformer and use a second one connected to the secondary low voltage side.
both secondaries of course same voltage as an isolation Transformer.
Possibly a better idea trying to save the expense of a dedicated isolation Transformer.
This is non-critical but a way to do it inexpensively.
Without going overboard on some really hard to find Oddball Transformer.
Although theoretically it could be done possibly something off-the-shelf as replacement part??
I have used power supply Transformers back-to-back for isolation.
Not an ideal situation but it works.
AKA just looking for a rough-and-ready down-and-dirty lowest cost solution!
Also with the fairground lighting system he is referring to I was thinking about with if it's available for the United States Market AKA 120 volts ac.
Instead of 240 ac.
This might be something that may work for stand-alone Christmas light displays as a lighting controller.
Either Navy for animation or even just interesting patterns what I have you that don't repeat very often in some cases!
Plus the modularity of the system.
And could definitely be customizable because eprom storage!
You could even had an enable / disable input if desired.
Say you're switching between different things and or changing things in Cycles or whatever on your light displays.
And since everything is already ethernet type connections the system could be easily built up and also modular in its entirety.
If you're not using all channels you could even be able to do something to sync things together AKA start-stop or inhibit.
You may want to do something but not go full-blown computer-controlled this might be an option or a slight modification of this system might work.
Also something like this might be alcohol to almost anything where you want to be able to control lighting in specific patterns.
but yet modular easy to service robust what have you.
Or say you're doing a chasing system and using incandescent Christmas lights.
or perhaps even a mix of mini lights and full size Christmas lights AKA C7 and 1/2 in C7 as well.
And want to keep everything in sync even on multiple power supply circuits.
Since everything is fully isolated this might be the solution!
Been thinking about that many years!
And yes I've seen both scr's and trac's blown to bits under heavy fault!
Happened One Time when I was servicing something and another occurred after the initial repair while still under test!
Yes I did omit the word AC volts.
but probably would be understood also any ideas on that if you really do need to say volts ac every time?
Just in general conversation with or comments in something like this it saves a bit of banter one could say.
Just want to know if somebody out there with no if that's acceptable to admit things like that when something would probably be known already.
I am self-taught in electronics and sometimes people have questions like this.
you know and of course people like me would not be with IEEE nomenclature ran into that quite a bit so those people are out there let's just call electrical electronics know-it-alls.
In a way that's not offensive but just giving backlash to let's just say the people that's between Hobby and getting there!
Electronics enthusiasts Unite!
Any thoughts on any of this please comment don't be a hater please!
there's enough of those here on RUclips you know.
Also I wonder if there would be someone like this open source?
One last thing.
Back probably in the 80s they had those brass Christmas bells that were actual Bells not the bells of Christmas that the sound was produced electronically.
More than likely probably just a couple of logic gates connected with a couple external components to produce a decaying tone reminiscent of a bell.
And yes easy to do there is a project in proper Electronics don't know which Edition or the name of the project exactly.
It had a representation of a swinging Bell and LEDs and and a sound effect.
Also seen other similar circuits elsewhere for imitating a sound of a bell Wikipedia logic gates in a few other passive components.
But I digress.
Back to those brass Christmas tree Belle's dad actually played Christmas songs.
The controller was entirely based around a a single memory chip Darlington drivers standard logic chips.
Essentially was working very similar to how it works on the clocking on this lighting controller in the video.
Basically just walking through one memory address at a time.
Since it only used eight Bells which yes you can play music with only eight notes available.
Essentially all it was was a memory chip that was programmed as far as you can go with as much music that would fit plus a few pauses between.
To fill the memory chip.
As each 8-bit byte was accessed if there was a a bill that need to played A 1 was present when 0 is present the Bell was not played.
Chances are it was probably just a counter that was just looping through all outputs a steady rate.
Also I do know for sure that that's how the old Marquee lights used to work the first ones that came out.
Yeah when are set finally died salvaged.
If I'm not mistaken I repurpose the controller for something think it had something to do with something that I built a marquee for someone else's model railroad.
Is running off the AC from one of the train power packs.
I found it was easy enough to use it on low voltage!
Saved me some Time by repurposing!
Also I heard recently it's still going strong.
Although a few of the bulbs had to be replaced.
But I used subminiature screw base bulbs!
For that reason.
Also fast acting fuse in each of the four circuits incase of an issue.
Wished it happened once although controller survived!
Just goes to show bit of over-engineering sometimes is beneficial
I've been fascinated with flat rides since I was a little kid. So many fantastic memories going to the fair and being just entranced by the crazy moving rides and brilliant lights. Seeing this, and that my new favorite RUclipsr had a part in it feels really special. :)
One can clearly see how much thought went into these even before you started explaining the layout. I love to see well engineered appliances. Thank you for showing this around
Yay for bullet crimps. I tried so many connectors. Ended up getting those gold 4mm and 2mm solderable plug connectors. And wago boxes for mains.
Btw. I have this romance about carnies and rousties and do bit of secretly envy that life. Once I was sort of a roustabout on some big event here in NL for a few times, wel actually a rigger took me on tow for some specific annual job. And I loved the work atmosphere and the characters the job attracts. And the fresh air. I miss that. Even if it was cold and miserable sometimes and hard work for but a 2-day event .
So I enjoy your work tales, and the tech angle very much, cheers.
I have a sudden urge to go to dodgy carnivals now and open their lighting cabinets to see if they're Emanator boards.
Clive: I agree with the power indicator. I go further with mains, low voltage rails, and blown fuse indicators. It wouldn't be a good design for a consumer item due to incremental cost but I like seeing all the lights and knowing what is going on.
That's very impressive to me Clive. Very nice engineering and work.
This is super cool background info to learn. Thanks for sharing!
Thanks for that bit of history, gives me more appreciation of your videos and respect for your opinions - carney ties notwithstanding. Carry on. Cheers.
I have a playlist I keep to refresh or certain things i haven't fully wrapped my head around, but learn the most and most recommed.This ones going in there.. Thanks for sharing your knowledge .It has helped me understand alot.
Those are amazing. You made them robust, safer, modular and easily fixed. If i had to write thst much code, it would take days. If not, more. Great job Clive
I made a control unit to run the helter skelter light string at Chipperfields Fair Ground, Dorset, back in the 70's. I switched DC, not AC using thyristors to switch on and a shunt power transistor to switch the voltage off across the thyristor to switch it off. Five channel 2kW per channel, 250V DC incandescent lamps running down the ride at night. Scary stuff DC!
The DC is quite viscous. Like working with an arc welder. I used to service the old DC controllers that used a capacitor to briefly shunt the other thyristors when the next in sequence was turned on.
Yes good fun, I still have curly hair and a Harley-Davidson beard, to go with my 1965 XLCH1000. I made it to retirement, which is very pleasing and I will be getting all my NI contributions and hopefully tax back before I move off this mortal coil. Good to see your experiments. Keep it up.
I had no idea that it was possible to make PCBs with a different color soldermask on the top and bottom. The thought honestly never occurred to me.
It's tricky getting it done that way. I tried it recently with a Chinese supplier and they said they could do it and then didn't.
A Carney at heart! Nice to hear of your past life on the fair rides. Keep up the video they are most interesting. The modern world is complex and difficult to understand. Recently purchased a power bank that worked on two phones,a tablet,etc. However will not charge my new Moto g5 phone!
You are so good. One day, the light will go on and I will understand. Even now, (2019) I have trouble getting beyond the bridge rectifier, which I totally understand. I love electronics but they don't want me to know them. I am getting closer with your videos. Keep up the good work. I watch a lot of RUclips channels but I seem to gravitate to BigClive. I think it is the accent. No, it is the delivery. You know how it works. And you explain it well. I'm in first grade and 56 years old.
The more you play with electronics the more it makes sense.
One of my favourite vids, genuinely informative :)
Just watched this as YT recommended it after watching q&a vids. Great stuff. I would like to an example of this system in action.
another great video, and love the modular design
QuickBasic Rules OK! I used that a lot back in the day, along with Lotus 123 and DataEase for DOS. There's a program called "QuickBasic" avaiable today to run under Windows, but all the keywords are case-sensitive! Good old progress.
Wow fascinating! :) I wondered about the patterns!
I too did repairs for fairgrounds and midways in my younger years, the nightmares WIRING and SAFETY I would find of OTHERS workmanship was out right deadly. Some of the workers would TRY to fix their ride them self by putting car fuse in the sound amps they was OVER driving. had to redesign the amp so the main audio chip could be replace fast and install a resettable fuse
This was a great video - I design tech for event installations, very similar to fairground tech in many ways, and use a LOT of the same ideas for protection, human error when installing etc. Totally different world to consumer electronics 😁
There are still firms making mechanical sequencers, border chasers etc. out there costing hundreds of $s - weird in this age of PIC controllers.
+Richard Deasington The mechanical ones are bomb-proof. If a contact burns out or a switch breaks you can replace it. If a microcontroller based one fails it can often mean having to buy a whole new controller.
+bigclivedotcom do you have any mechanical ones laying around? Would love to see that in a video.
+DerekJ It's extremely rare to see a mechanical controller in the UK. They are primarily electronic. I did notice that I could hear a lot of mechanical ones in use in America.
+bigclivedotcom probably just a relay click. Most of our rides are overkill, like a PLC for controlling the lights
plcs are super popular across all industries to this day, and are often hilariously over-specced for the jobs they do.
In those days EPROMs E-EPROMs and UV-EPROMs were the way to go. :)
It's such a clean solution. I really like it :)
To wipe the data off of these didn’t you have to expose them to sunlight?
UV-EPROMs were EPROMS. You erased them by exposing them to ultraviolet light in an EPROM eraser. Yes, sunlight will work in a pinch, but it took longer. EEPROMS came much later. The other type were PROMS, which were sometimes the same device but didn't have the windows, so you could only write them once. Though I've heard if you could manage to take them to a hospital, and have them x-rayed a few times, they would often be erased and reusable. Other PROMS had fuses inside, and once they were blown, that was it.
I understand little of what your talking about but I ended up watching the entire thing well done
Ahhh Clive: Nicely Done. How many units like this did you actually produce??? I liked your story about how you had to fix OTHER Manufacture boards ...Sweet.
I'm not sure how many I made, but for a good length of time every ride exported from the UK had my controllers in it.
+bigclivedotcom I believe I have seen your work in action! Unfortunately, in the US, carnies just patch the equipment back together just well enough that it runs. That attitude is probably why new rides aren't being ordered anymore. Great design on those circuitboards! No wonder your designs were copied, but it is a shame to steal such a good design.
Too interesting! I want to know more! =D So fun stuff you've been working with!! =D
Now surely this one netted you a bit. I'll have to look around the back next time I'm at a fair.
Hello Clive, from another Carnie at heart. 60s-70s.
Once a carnie, always a carnie. You can never escape. Especially when you get to know the truth about the people behind the image.
@@BigClive Our crew occasionally slept in the town jail (doors unlocked) for our own safety. We travelled a lot.
can i have more carnival vids?
I've designed and built a hell of a lot of very high current 3P motor controllers and I've never seen anything like this. Amazing work.
How on earth did you get this stuff listed by rating services? There is no way I could get away with this approach.
At very least, the mains power supply would have to have a final fused disconnect before the control circuit link. Not off board but between the transformer section and either the regulator or logic sections.
Just amazing what you got away with. I can't imagine what the crappy ones you refer to look like (not to imply that your brilliant work is in anyway crappy, just that it would be unlistable by UL under our NFPA.)
These units were not in any way certified. The market was too small and specialised to go through a listing procedure. The full panels contained suitable circuit protection and all the transformers I used were inherently short circuit proof and had internal PTC thermistor protection that provided better in-situ protection than a fuse could for phase/neutral accidents. by electrical standards the units were deliberately over engineered based on the real life environment they were working in. They're still working right now all around the world.
Id really like to see the guts of a carnie's control getup. I'll admit, trying to figure out how the yearly show's light spstem worked as a ten year old was a pretty big aspect of forming my career Path. I now build LED signage, mostly ITS (traffic management), but some RGB Stuff, also Flip Dots. I was entirely schooled with Micros, absolutely blew my mind talking to some of our elmer engineers, what could be done with just an eeprom.
Id love to see more on the CliveCapricorn system!
Memories of 1980's 'Elector magazine's' multi-display patterned dance floor with 5 pages of coding that my work colleague who ran a dance studio in the evenings wanted me to build.
Way over my head but enjoy listening to someone who knows there business.
did you have a hardware gated reset for the programm counter or did you just fill up the eprom 100% and display all of its contents?
+Blowitup1991 Full EPROM looping round
i used to make the opal lightings controllers
Not related to this particular video Clive, but something I have NOT been able to find definitively online, do you know what voltage do dodgems operate at? Every time I approach a fairground ride with a DMM I get shooed away!
The overhead ones work at 110V DC, but have variable voltage depending on how "zippy" the operator wants the dodgem cars to be. The ones with the alternate polarity floor panels tend to work at 50V. On the traditional cars the token mechanism traps the token against a switch until the end of the ride when the polarity of the supply switches briefly and a solenoid ejects the token away from the switch into the collection container.
bigclivedotcom Thanks for that detailed response, DC surprises me, I was expecting AC for some reason. Not come across any of the alternating floor panel ones personally yet, without the mast they give the guy nothing to hang on to!
***** The alternating floor panel ones are rare, and usually only used where there's no over head clearance. They consist of a floor of alternate polarity metal panels with insulator sections between them, and the cars have a number of electrical brushes which pick power up from whichever plate they're contacting. Each brush is connected to the cars common DC motor bus by two diodes, so no matter what position the car is in or what polarity the brushes are they will power the motor.
bigclivedotcom Ingenious!
any chance on doing any videos on 3 phase generators? how they work and why they are used? as a mobile caterer we have one and use it, but i'd like to know more about what im using.
That's actually a huge subject that opens up a can of worms regarding grounding depending on the location and vicinity to other supplies. The main things to know is that your loads should be spread across the three phases for most efficient operation and extreme care should be taken with the wiring to ensure you don't lose the neutral as that could cause electrical damage to some equipment.
Weird thing is I've been watching your content for years now and never seen this one. But found it after searching for "fairground lighting control". I'm researching a new scale model project for myself. I'm a Ghost Train nut! So yeah I'm looking into replicating in scale the way a traditional Ghost train sign is animated. Obviously using LED's and some sort of programable controller. I'm no coder so I was wondering if you could point me in the right direction of an off the shelf DIY solution...? Love your content by the way. Always learning!!
Hi Clive do you still have any of these pcb controllers left ? It would be good for a project I have in mind as I can’t find anything similar on the market.
Nice Work!!!!!
So, old style solid and repairable, or new style cheap and replaceable.
Can I ask why triacs and not SSR. Was it more to do with cost? As now most SSR’s contain the opto isolator. Thanks :)
Cost and size.
I think this could still have a market in the US
Most of them ended up in America.
Where can I get hold of one of these?
Hi Clive, I've been clover subscriber for a while now and it has taken me some time to find this as I seen it not long after you did this. I am looking for a controller for my lights, I have bought 5 X 12 lamp strips of the cabochon lights and I want them to do patterns or move randomly. Can you help at all please? I would appreciate and pay for any service you recommend. Thank you 😁
no way qbasic lol it was like atari programming but better used to mess about with that when ma pc died and i had DOS on a crappy desktop with floppys ....the good old days lol
Could you try to copyright your eprom program?
Then maybe issue licences for companies so they can use it.
It's too easy to copy. It does have a copyright symbol on it, but there's no way to protect data in a standard EEPROM so it can be read and then used to make as many copies as desired.
That’s really shit! As you say all the hours of programming which lets be honest is soul destroying just for them to help themselves!
I designed a monitoring sheet for refrigerated containers whilst plugged in at quayside waiting for shipment which nowadays would take someone probably less than an hour but it’s still used worldwide today so although I was peeved I am a bit proud of that also.
so to try and keep a glass half full perspective at least a little bit of you is lighting up ( literally) happy faces all around the world.
so ur a gaffladd? who did u travel for? i got close ties to showmen also.
Just random travel with the Codonas. Mainly repairing stuff.
You ever do any work for Codonas in Aberdeen? I've done the odd repair job for them.
Mainly the Glasgow Codona's. Plus others.
Pompous ? Me thinks not !
What comes to mind is a short sentence from an old tv show that some of you here might remember : No brag, just fact !
do you speak the cant, clive? i bet the scottish polari is pretty wild.
Since my birth sign is Aquarius, any chance I can buy an Aquarius controller from you Clive?
Is there any way I could get the schematics from you, they seem perfect for controlling lights and animatronics in my haunted house that may become a darkride.
+AlbanyHauntCA They're not really ideal for animatronics. You'd be better with an Arduino.
+bigclivedotcom I love the Arduino
+bigclivedotcom those things are complicated
+AlbanyHauntCA They look complicated, but you really just have to buy one (or more) and sit down and treat them like a toy. Just doing simple things and working your way up as everything starts to make sense and fall into place. They're like electronic Lego.
+bigclivedotcom - I can confirm that, just like Lego, it hurts like hell to step on one barefoot.
Hi BigClive. Thank you for making this video. I'm dreaming for years on making a project with these attractive funfair lights. Do you know some dealers in Europe ( I'm from Belgium) or China who sell these lights? Some call them Mushroom lights, others call them TurboLite and others call them cabuchon lights. What is the proper name of them to get some google results?
+videoKen1 I refer to them as cabochon.
www.actionlighting.com/ in the US sells these in different sizes
Did you ever work for M&D's (Taylors) or Whites
I did repairs for them.
@@BigClive - I worked for 7 summers at Burntisland shows in thew late 70s, early 80s
emanatordotdemondotcodotuk isn't resolving anymore :'(
They didn't keep up to date with traffic allowance for a basic site and kept taking it down. That was despite costing as much as I pay now for a massive allowance that I barely scratch.
Yeah, some Chinese specialty companies come and go like men at a house of ill repute
.