An 8-light DiscoLitez rig controlled by Liberty Basic

This is about a bar of mains lamps controlled from your computer's parallel printer port. It gave me a chance to get my computer interacting with the real world & humans in an impressive way. (I am a teacher...) Possibly even useful.. & I do come from the home of Bridgwater & Taunton carnivals!

The photos give an idea of my particular construction scheme- bar has 8 x 100W bulbs, is about 1.5m long ( 4 feet), and has the interface drive box at the end. Cables are to printer port & to mains. Eight identical zero-crossing opto-isolators drive triacs with no mains interference. The bulbs tend to be the most expensive bit if you get carried away- each channel could drive 1kW of bulbs.

The basic circuit is available from the DiscoLitez home site. It is designed to run as an add-on to WinAmp which plays your *.wav & *.mp3 files, etc. WinAmp runs the lights as on-screen small 'mimic' lights instead of or as well as the external lamps.

BEWARE MANY COMPONENTS ARE AT MAINS POTENTIAL!

Use proper insulation/earthing practice. Track spacing on strip board is NOT designed to insulate mains voltage- hence my 'mid-air jungle' layout. Use earthed boxes or double-insulation, and use rubber grommets and sound cable termination.

I did not find I needed the 'snubber' or RC network across the circuit...

The zipped program files can be run in Liberty Basic. If you do not have this (shame on you!) there is a zipped self-contained file of 833k here to download, unzip to a directory & run the *.exe file.
The drivers are addressed directly off the printer (parallel) port.
For Liberty Basic users it gives a dramatic way of setting up (say) Christmas or disco /party lights. Since you are not using Winamp or the DiscoLitez plug-in you can write LB programs to sequence & time the lights, etc. Liberty Basic LB3 can address the port in anything from W95 thro' 2000 & NT. Liberty Basic has a thriving user community- & the author of LB, Carl Gundel, is available on-line for the (few) bugs or problems. If you send appropriate patterns and wave the bar through the air you can 'write in mid-air'- think of it as an ink-jet printer sending flashes of colour!!
It is sensible to experiment at first with cheap LEDs & resistors on the printer port. Again, details on the DiscoLitez site.

Hope you are encouraged to experiment!
Please contact me with queries or adaptations at mr.john.f@gmail.com