Christmas Lighting in Abundance

gral writes "My boss really gets into setting up Christmas lights. He has been interviewed by a couple TV stations, because of his displays. He usually has them setup at his house. This year he has moved to a Church Yard for more space. For 2003, his display sports over 200,000 lights, each string is controlled by computer to light to the tune of a Radio Station playing christmas music. Check out his website at Planet Christmas. Some pictures of this year's display can be seen as well. Have fun and Happy Holidays."

Comments

Gentoo packages for lighting

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, forgot this in the writeup, but there are some Gentoo packages out for lighting for your Christmas trees and houses.

Check out Gentoo.org for more details.

You may need a 3D card to view demos though.

Last year...

[anaphora]

I had a friend who did something like this. He hooked 8000 (yes, eight thousand) lights up and made one continuous string across the entire yard, then set it up as a chaser. It looked REALLY good.

Around me

[Politburo]

Here is the house about 5 minutes from mine which is by far the most decorated house in the area. It is actually some Elvis impersonator, so his display always has an Elvis theme and usually has Elvis music playing. The display requires the police for traffic control, and it's been said that the gentleman has worked out a special agreement with O&R (or maybe PSEG), the local energy company. I haven't been to the house in about 5 years. They say he adds more lights every year, so I have no idea if it still looks like the pictures.

A story of economic progress

[DeepRedux]

Virginia Postrel has an article about the booming business of professional Christmas lighting installation. One franchise company installs lights for 300,000 customers each year. The business grew through the recession. Most customers earn over $400K.

As a source of mass employment, we have moved from agriculture, to manufacturing, and now into aesthetics. It is not that agriculture has disappeared from the US, but it is down to about 3% of the economy.

Geek Lights

[t_allardyce]

ok how about a string of lights where each was individually controllable - each socket contained a simple switch that would look on a serial data bus for its individual code and switch its light on or off accordingly. To set it up you would drape the lights around randomly and then point a camera at the tree/house/bush etc. A computer would use the camera to calibrate by switching each light one by one and noting the position on the camera until it built up a rough pattern of light positions (this would take anything from seconds to minutes depending). Then you could use the lights as a crude dot-matrix display. The light detection routine wouldn't be that hard to do, and you could even have the lights pulse at a certain frequency to make detection easier for the computer. A step further would be to place the camera more than once to build up a 3D model of light positions. I think there are already mass produced components that can respond when they detect their code on a serial interface, imagine the possibilities given enough lights and cheap production?