I'm 62 and just started with animated Christmas lights. My story is nearly identical to many others that arrived here before me. After watching the Gangnam Style light show from a house in Australia on youtube I looked at my daughters and said, we can do that. When I finally managed to stumble onto the DIYC Beginners Info page December 2, 2012 I knew I was among kindred spirits. I scanned through the information and understood about 10% of it. I decided the best thing was to just jump in and if I got stuck it looked like I could get help from the vast pool of knowledge on the site. I ordered a Renard SS16 on Dec. 3rd and started soldering on December 8th. Following the instructions on my ipad I got on the wrong line and soldered 16 resistors in the wrong place. When I got to the next step and discovered the mistake, I de-soldered and corrected the problem (I wondered why those were the only parts with the leads not bent to the right length, doh!). Ordered a programmer, tried to download the pic program file and my computer kept opening the file instead of letting me download it. Copy and paste text to notepad, renamed the file, converted it to hex, flashed the pic's, downloaded Vixen, wrote a basic on-off-fade sequence for a few strands of lights, hit play, and me: "HOLY COW look at this, it works girls!", girls, "yea, whatever Dad". It rains off and on all week but we get some lights put up. I order a 25' com cable, a USB to com adapter for the laptop, and an FM transmitter from China. Gotta make me one of those cool leaping arches. My daughter ran the light board for a lot of plays at school and agrees to do the sequence. We cut the song down to a minute and forty seconds because she's tired of sequencing and nobody's going to want to listen to it for 3+ minutes anyway. We made this video on Dec. 23rd. On the morning of the 24th we poked holes in a piece of foam board to spell out "FM 87.9", put lights in the holes and had it ready for our annual Christmas eve party. I put on a black shirt, white dinner jacket, and dark sunglasses and greeted my guests with my best Psy dance impersonation. So of course I've already ordered over $500 of stuff to add to next years show. Thanks to everyone that blazed the trail for me to follow.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXfJpnYWJGk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXfJpnYWJGk