Thread: Flickering Light Fixture

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Hey all!
First post . I've been a long-time forum watcher, and absolutely love all of the things I see here, it really helps inspire me and get me in the mood for the haunting season! (Not that it requires much :P)... A quick backstory on my haunted past , for the past 11 years (starting at the age of 10) I have worked in a "Haunted Woods". I am the owner/operator of one of the 15 or so skits back there.

So, I'd like to start of by stating that I have indeed searched for this, and have found my answer... sort-of. What I want to do is make a lightbulb flicker or flash, in the most random sense possible, I am aware of the flicker buttons and solution like those, but they produce a very repetetive flash, like a strobe almost. So the thread I found was made by MadMax (who was incredibly informative, thanks so much for that!) that thread is here:
Flicker Light Controller Made from Christmas Lights

However, the issue is the only light controllers I can find differ from his. I made an MSPaint drawing below to try and help illustrate my problem, I know the drawings are crude, but I hope they serve their purposes:


My question is, since the setup here is different, what wires correlate to MadMax's tutorial?

Wires 1 and 2 appear to be unnecessary
Wire 3 appears to be the "common" wire, as he addresses it
Wires 4,5,6 appear to be the wires he uses to connect to the outlet, does it matter which 2 of these I use?


Any help is appreciated, sorry if something needs clarified, just ask and I'd love to try and explain it!

Thanks!

I'm not familiar with this set up. I use the fluorescent lamp starter caps in line in the cords and they work very well.

I don't understand how the circuitry works but I want to point out that wires 1 and 2 connect to the outlet. Wires 3-6 connect to stings of lights. Be careful!

Originally Posted by chili

I'm not familiar with this set up. I use the fluorescent lamp starter caps in line in the cords and they work very well.

Im not familiar with that setup either... how does it work, is there a thread somewhere about it that I could read up on?


And the bigger issue is i'm unclear why two of the wires run to the outlet, im not used to seeing that, would those both be "ground" wires?
I think for the purposes of comparing the two setups (mine and MadMax's), that his common wire, would be my wire 3, and then my wires 4,5,6 are strands of lights, so they work as a the connections to the wall socket/receptacle... my largest confusion is based on those two outlet wires, wires 1 and 2.

There are several write-ups on the flickering light with the starter. Some work better than others as far as using different starters (FS #'s). I'll take a look at the ones I used and the wattage of the bulbs because they all affect the outcome. The lamps I used were the cheap work lights with the metal dome. I put one on each side of the top of my castle with a fog machine in the middle. The effect is really good with both of them going off randomly and independantly. The lamps have a spring loaded clip on them so they can be mounted easily and pointed in the desired direction. Hope this helps.

Im familiar with what kind of lamp you're talking about, and that would actually work great with the theme of our skit this year... and I believe I have some of those lying around . If you could find out the wattage of the bulbs, and the starter numbers that would be awesome! Did you have a fuse in-line anywhere?

I didn't use an inline fuse but it would be a good idea to do so. Mine get plugged into a surge protecter power strip with built in fuse. I'll get that info for you as soon as I get home tonight. I was impressed at how well this worked for such a cheap prop.

Thanks, I really appreciate it. Now im all excited! haha

We did it for our evil canival set. We used a "color organ". It's a device that passes electical current when it detects sound. The louder the sound, the more voltage it delivers. We used a loop of a soundbyte that sounded like an electric chair. You know, sparking and humming. Then the device made the lights flicker in sync with the sound. Very nice effect. There are some commercial versions of this sold at novelty shops for Halloween and Christmas.

I looked into Audio-to-Light modulation, and plan to use it at some point in the future, for a recurring sound-effect used in our skit, my brother creates the soundtracks for us every year, and he generated a sound that sounds like metal being scraped together really loudly (almost like the sound of a knife being sharpened, but drug slowly, and scraping along), which would work great with audio to light modulation, but I didnt have the time to play with it this year, that would work really good with an electric chair though, to mock the lights dimming like you are used to seeing in old movies when an electric chair would go off, sounds like it was really neat!