"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.
"Dude! That’s been done too!"
Well, yes, it has. One of the first was Alek Komar who rigged up his light display to X-10 modules. Visitors to his holiday website could turn the lights on and off with the click of a mouse while watching it live via a webcam. Or so they thought :). Turns out, in 2004, the site was a hoax. The display was real, but Alek had taken a series of webcam shots with various combinations of the lights on and off and rigged them so when a user turned on or off the lights, they saw the ‘webcam image’ change as if they really HAD turned them on and off. But it wasn’t live. In 2005, he rigged up an actual webcam and now the site IS live, but it was a free for all. The lights blinked like crazy.
There have been a few others who have done this as well. A guy in Winston-Salem, NC took things further and used relays hooked to an embedded controller to control his display, all watched via a webcam. He hit the media big time and millions of people have visited his site, ControlTheShow.com. A unique aspect of his site is he queues people up so only one person is controlling the house, allowing people to experiment without others flipping the switches.
This appealed to me since I have a background in embedded control design. Home automation has always been a favorite hobby of mine, though I haven’t had much time to devote to it lately. For a few years I ran a home automation equipment company designing various boards to help control your home. I also love Christmas and lights. I’ve toyed with creating an animated display for a few years but other things have kept me from doing it. But I always figured I’d do it one year and hopefully this is the year.
What I want to do is chronicle what goes into making the display. Most sites have a page with a few pictures highlighting what controls their display. Using the popular WordPress blog software, I hope to post articles as I work on the display’s design so there’s a whole bunch of information at the end of the year highlighting how the show works and possibly enough info so you can ‘roll your own’ of you choose. No matter what it’ll be fun!
Now, like I mentioned above, I could buy off the shelf hardware, write a little software, and be done with it. But what fun would that be? I want to ‘roll my own’ as they say. Within reason. In my next post I’ll talk about my ideas for the display, what existing hardware I may use, and what control architecture I hope to use. Posting to this site will be irregular - as I have time to work on stuff, I’ll post. So check back often, or subscribe to the RSS feed.
The site is still fairly new as I write this, so expect a number of the pages to be ‘empty’. I hope to start adding additional information soon. If it stays as cold as it was this week, I’ll have LOTS of time indoors to spend on it!
Further Reading:
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