Live Light Show

Clearly, I wasn’t able to put the show together for 2007. Despite my grand hopes for the year, other commitments and projects took up the bulk of my time and I wasn’t able to spend nearly as much time on the display as I had hoped. But I’m still very excited about putting this together for 2008. All I was able to do this year light wise was put up a few thousand lights (a mix of incandescent and LED), drawing around 1050W. Ho hum.

Speaking of LED lights - they clearly are ‘the future’ of holiday lighting, but they’ve always been too dim and the colors just a bit off. But that is changing. While many LED strings were still too dim for my tastes, I did find a set that was fantastic. The Sylvania (made by Inliten actually) C4 LED light strings that Wal-Mart and some Home Depots had are great. I have 8 of these 60 light strings around the property. They are some of the most brilliant LED Christmas lights I have seen. One reason they may be so bright is they have three power supplies along the string in small green plastic boxes while most LED strings only have one power supply in the plug. This lets them drive more powerful LEDs and reduce voltage drops in the long wires.

Sylvania’s white strings are also very bright, but are still ‘cool white’ not ’soft white’, which I expect to change in a year or two. But the color strings are fantastic, with five colors (Blue, Red, Green, Yellow, and Orange). But they aren’t cheap ($10 for 60 at Wal-Mart). Costco had a soft white LED string, though they weren’t very bright, but they looked more like normal incandescent lights than most white LED lights.

I expect my display will still be mostly incandescent lights, simply due to cost. It’ll be a few more years before LED strings are anywhere near as cheap as current incandescent strings. Plus, while they are looking better and better each year, they’ll never have the warmth of incandescent lights - which I think will always have a place in holiday displays.

So thanks for stopping by! Sorry I wasn’t able to pull things together this year. But I’m definitely going to do this, just for the fun of building and coding everything.

For reasons I noted in my previous post, X-10 simply isn’t feasible for the type of setup I want. It’s too slow. But it sure makes wiring a breeze! As I put up our standard decorations this year, I realized that there was one decoration that X-10 may make sense for. The candles in the windows. It would be next to impossible to wire them up via any other type of wired control without wires strung all over the house. So in this case X-10 makes sense. I can use X-10 Lamp Modules to control the candles and this will allow them to be controlled as part of he show. The remaining question is will it be worth controlling them as they don’t tend to be very bright, but if all the other lights were shut down, they would stand out.

In order to include X-10, I just need to include a routine to send out X-10 commands via the main controller. I’ll also have to include some type of throttling for the X-10 commands since they can’t react as fast as DMX. Perhaps only let the states flip or a dim sequence be sent every X seconds. Otherwise it would impact any other X-10 use in the house. We’ll see.

Regardless of the details, I may be able to utilize X-10 in a way that makes sense, even if just for a small part of the over all show.

Now we get to have some fun and start looking at actual equipment and electronics. Since we’re going to use the industry standard DMX control protocol, we should be able to leverage that in deciding what to use to control the lights and other things in the holiday display.

As I noted in an earlier post, the one area I’d rather get ‘off the shelf’ and avoid doing myself is the 120VAC dimming and switching. Sure, it can be done, but utilizing some off the shelf equipment for the line dimming and switching will not only make things safer, it’ll also allow more time to be spent on the control side of things. One of the big advantages of doing it yourself, however, is cost. Will off the shelf components be economical? Well, they can be if they come off your own shelf.

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If the nodes that control the power to the light strings and fixtures will be networked, that requires some type of communication medium (wire or wireless) and a protocol for communicating with the nodes.

Most people when they hear you want to network something instantly think ‘Ethernet‘. What many people don’t realize is that there are often better methods to network something in a local environment that doesn’t require Ethernet’s power and speed. Consider what kind of data will go across this network. We’ll be telling the nodes simple things like ‘Channel 4, Level X’ where X might be between 0 and 255. We aren’t transmitting War and Peace. If all we need to transmit are simple channel IDs and light levels, do we really need all the overhead of a normal TCP/IP packet?

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The next few posts will outline some of the ideas I have for how the show will be run. From hardware to software and even specifics about what type of lights to use and how to string them together.

To get things started, I want to talk about the electrical side of things.

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One of the main ideas behind this project is to not only make the display interactive, but to allow people to follow the development of the display over time, make suggestions, comment on the designs, etc. Blog software fit those requirements to a ‘T’.

I have a lot of experience with the WordPress blog software, so I decided to use that right away. Not only will it provide me with an easy to update website, but it also has a number of extension that will come in handy for the display. The fact that WordPress is becoming more of a CMS and less of a blog platform every day means I may be able to leverage things like user sessions and account for the custom software developed for the show. Only time will tell. The idea here is to leverage the site platform software as much as possible.

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"Dude! That’s so been done already!"

Why exactly would I want to create an interactive holiday display for my house? Plenty of folks have done it, with a couple actually forming new companies around the hardware and software they developed for their holiday light displays. Thanks to these companies (Light-O-Rama and Animated Lighting are two) and cheap webcams, you can setup an absolutely amazing display for about $1500 and broadcast the shows on the web for all to see. One house in particular was so popular due to a viral video of their show that the police had to ask them to turn it off after traffic got so bad by their house. That video was seen by millions of people. Snopes has a good write up and the owners website is WonderlandChristmas.

The trick is, most of those show displays are just that - shows. You can see them live or on YouTube. They are amazing, synchronized to music, and really make for a fun time during the holidays. But they’re still, er, static.

But what I’m interested in is an interactive holiday display where people can control the display over the Internet and watch what happens live.

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