Thread: Chasing light for an alien/ship theme

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This year we are going to incorporate an area of our haunt to include an alien or spaceship theme.
We have a long hallway that we lined with foam apple dividers. These things are AWESOME! They just seem pretty 'spacey' looking now that they are covering the wall.

What I want to do is have lights along the top near the ceiling that chase. I would like only one light on at a time, and 'chase' down this hallway.
Seems like most chasing lights look more like the "off" light chases down the line rather than the "on" light chasing down the line. ( make sense?) Seems like there is always MANY lights on at a time rather than one on at a time.

Anyway, I have a prop 1 controller so I need a program for it to do this.... Any help? I only know a little about programing these things.

Plus, I would need lights... The hall is around 20 ft long. I dont need tons of lights but I was thinking of about 1 every foot or so. Maybe 24 lights would work out well. I dont know if I should use LED or other type of bulb and I am not sure just the best way to wire this....
What do you guys think? DOABLE?

If you have an EFX Prop-1, go to their forums and ask for advice. They have excellent customer service and will be able to tell you what your controller can do, but will write the code for you if you describe what you want.

http://www.efx-tek.com/php/smf/index.php

I have a few EFX-TEK boards but still have to tinker with them, however that being said and reading their description of the board, at max it can only handle eight channels and you are mentioning 24 lights which would require three boards (8*3=24)and a way to sync them together if you want only one light to be on at a time. A typical lighting chase has two lights on and one off sequentially which one board could easily handle. In fact if I am correct that all eight I/O pins can be used as outputs, you could chase with one in eight on, that would mean three lights would be on at any given time with one EFX-TEK board.

Hope I made sense.

Mark

Have you thought of trying those cheap 10 LED chaser boards from All Electronics? They can be wired with an AND gate to run multiple boards in sequence, but you have to sacrifice a couple of the outputs on each of the 4017 decade counters to make it work. I suggest getting a couple of these boards and using your Prop 1 to switch power to each board in turn. The boards start running when power is applied, and always on LED1. Dialing in the interval between each board will be easy to do with a few tweaks to the code.
An alternative is to use a couple of 4051 multiplexers. Each MUX uses three pins of the Prop 1 for the decoded inputs and you get to control eight 5VDC outputs per MUX. Six pins of the Prop 1 = 16 LEDs or relays. The wiring for these devices is easy and I have schematics if needed.

I've been thinking of a cheap way to do something like this for awhile and I keep coming back to a rotating dial switch.

Make a circle of separate metal rays. Each ray is a positive connection for a different light. The center of the circle is the negative. Make a dial (metal below, plastic above) for it with a hole for a ball bearing that crosses over the rays. You can have more than one ball bearing if you want more than one light to turn on at a time. Find a motor to constantly turn the dial. I would only use something like this for a low voltage application.

That would work. You could also use a rotating striker to hit a ring of roller tab snap switches. The chasing speed would be set by adjusting the motor speed.