This shows the equipment I owned today for doing my own special effects.  The small box the very top is called a brain, it sends out all the commands to the controllers.  The box on the left is a 30 amps controller and the box on the right is a 15 and controller.

We are now looking inside of a 30 amps controller.  You can see that there are 16 different places to plug-in electric components and that each of them have a number.  With the numbers you can control what turned on and what turns off from the brain, and we will talk about that later.

This is a 15 amp controller and you will notice that it is a bit smaller.  Instead 16 different plugs come out so you can hook up different electrical effects to them and that each of them is numbered.  I have tried to use less electricity when I make up my displays to keep costs down over the five to six weeks that I run them.  This has led me to needing less power, and buying smaller controllers which are cheaper.

Now we are at the brain, which controls all of the external controllers and tell them what to do.  The brain can next to each of the controllers by standard network cable.  Each of the units has a selector unit so that you can give it a specific address.  At this time I can control up to 32 different effects.  When I bought this units it came with one controller, and later I added another one.  It came with one show preprogrammed onto memory chips.  Later I bought software from the company that allows me to program my own shows.

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