Innovative Christmas Light Setups?

glitch0 asks: "Recently, I found some pretty neat Christmas decorations, at a neighbors house. He has a light setup that syncs up with MIDI files of Christmas music. The cool part is the way you hear the music - it's broadcast using a radio transmitter so you can tune your car radio as you're driving by and hear and see the show. Do any other Slashdot readers have cool homebrew light setups or ideas for over-the-top holiday decorations?"

Comments

Re:recently I saw video online

[Gulthek]

More info on the famous Christmas lights video.

Includes an interview with the guy by a local radio station.

Simpler is better?

[lpangelrob]

This is me and my wife's first Christmas in our new house, so naturally, we're excited. I'm also lazy, so the entire content of our Christmas decorating consists of six strings of all white, not flashing lights. Our neighbor has about 45 lighted penguins out on the lawn, which is both tacky and an awesome way to promote Linux if one chose to do so.

The problem with more lights is that no one ever really takes the time to make lots of lights look good. No, icicle lights don't automatically make everything look better.

Re:Simpler is better?

[Morgalyn]

I second that complaint. I'm so tired of people lighting up the entire neighborhood with countless strands of tacky multicolored lights just strewn about in no pattern or reasonable fashion. There is one house down the street that looks like they just threw the lights at their bushes and then plugged them in. Tacky!

When I was growing up there was one street near where we lived where everyone was retired, and they competed every year for the most impressive christmas displays. They were always tasteful, if totally over the top. I think people are forgetting how to do that.

Re:Simpler is better?

[unlabeledchick]

What would be good, is a penguin fighting a borg drone, or Darth Vader... or some corporate bastard...

Countdown

[MullerMn]

Countdown till that fuckknuckle with the zillion Christmas lights starts pimping his website.. He does it on stories that have nothing to do with Christmas. He'll probably collapse in a foaming heap of excitement when he sees this one.

5.. 4.. 3.. 2..

Re:Countdown

[KilobyteKnight]

And a happy/sad/neutral winter/summer holiday/regular-day season/time-of-year to you/you-and-yours too/also.

Try to top this...

[anhyzer_mush]

This is waaaayyyy over the top. It's about 2-3 minutes long.

http://monke.undeadclan.com/Wizards_of_Winter_-_SM .wmv

The pulse of ... slashdot?

[stienman]

Google: christmas light display. The first two links are directly relevant, and nearly all of them relate to exactly this question.

Yeah, sure, I imagine that there's a small percentage of slashdot users that really go all out on christmas displays, but what are you really after here? If you want to see cool ways to do displays, Slashdot isn't the best forum to ask, and if you are interested in the best display, why ask in a less effective forum?

Reminds me of Charlie and the Chocolate factory, "And you - well, you're just lucky [to get your story posted], aren't you?"

-Adam

Whatever you do

[antifoidulus]

avoid an animated goatse man christmas lights display....

expertise

[doorbender]

thanks for the link Gulthek

it led me here http://computerchristmas.com/index.phtml?link=how_ to&HowToId=4&LowLimit=0

a picture of it complete.
http://computerchristmas.com/tmp/myimages/4-comple te2.jpg
it'll controll 8 circuits per port hehehe

How does that commercial go??

[technoextreme]

And for any Boston liberals, please replace "Christmas" with "Holiday" or "Kwanza" at your discretion.

Have a happy chrismkwazakah.

Why fiddle with exotic christmas light setups?

[Centurix]

I just have one fucking huge bulb attached to a bayonet I installed on the top of my house. When that sucker lights up it's the equivalent of living above the arctic circle. 24 hours of daylight baby!

do 200 RGB LEDs w/microcontrollers on tree count?

[Miamicanes]

As it so happens, I'm taking a break right this moment from the project that's consumed most of my free time for the past month, and likely to consume substantially all of it for the next week and a half: a string of 50 serial-networked Atmel ATtiny2313 microcontrollers, each juggling 4 independent RGB LEDs (total cost, not including support and development hardware, ~$250). As soon as I'm convinced that the bootloader I'm (hopefully) finishing this weekend can, in fact, successfully re-flash the chips once I've soldered them together and can't easily get at the SPI pins, the first 10-controller/40-LED segment will get built.

What will it (hopefully) be able to do? At the minimum, I'm hoping to program the following effects:

* each LED individually flickering like a candle flame, randomly and independently changing colors

* whole tree changing color in sync: red->yellow->green->cyan->blue->violet->red. This was actually a hard mode to program, because I had to re-do the entire LED-flashing algorithm to support temporarily combining the pair of 16-byte color buffers used by the two ports (each port controls 2 LEDs) into one big 32-byte buffer and increase the color resolution from 2 bits to 3 bits for slow whole-tree fades. I also had to change the pin assignments, to make sure that each port bit controlled an element of the same color on both ports.

* "Stupid Mode", where the controller sends 3-bytes in a row specifying the 2-bit RGB values for each of the four LEDs. I don't really plan to do much with this mode, but it's there as a backup plan if the bootloader scheme fails and I can't reflash the firmware at some future point. By cranking the baudrate up to 38.4k and speeding the controller up to 20MHz, I could probably pull off some decent effects. But I really want to make each controller smart and autonomous, so the controller just has to say, "group 3, slowly fade from red to violet, then hold using flicker effect #2 for 8 seconds before proceeding to the next instruction".

* of course, there's also "zombie" mode, activated by powering up the string without the controller. It's rather stupid and simple, but knows how to randomly change each LED's color every second or so. It's there to make sure that if I royally screw up the firmware on Christmas Eve, I'll still have an ok-looking tree to show off...

There will ultimately be 5 segments, connected together with a 5-pin DIN female socket on one end, and similar male plug on the other (3 wires total... Vcc, Gnd, and Serial data). One end will plug into the power supply and controller, which has a beefier microcontroller (ATMega162) to act like an orchestra's conductor and coordinate their activities when appropriate (and reflash the downstream microcontrollers when I update their firmware). Normally, all 50 chips will just watch the Serial line for 9600-baud serial broadcasts from the controller, but when given a reason and an opportunity to do so, they can individually pull the bus low to send crude signals back to the controller.

I'm still undecided about making them individually-addressable. My current plan is to make them group-addressable, with software-selectable group sizes of 3, 4, and 6. I can easily accomplish this by grounding none or one of the two "A" pins (3 possible groups: for 3-LED groups, they'd be 1-2-3-1, 2-3-1-2, and 3-1-2-3; for 4-LED groups, it would be irrelevant (each controller has 4 LEDs); for 6-LED groups, they'd be 1-2-3-4, 5-6-1-2, and 3-4-5-6. If I make them individually-addressable, I could do it the "easy" way and hardcode the base address of the first LED into each microcontroller's (basically-)immutable bootloader... but then I'll have to connect the strings in the right order. Alternatively, I can daisy-chain a fourth wire from the second "A" pin of each to chip to the first "A" pin of the next and use the neighbor-to-neighbor signaling to enumerate the string at reset. But really, as ideologically appealing as it seems to make each LED individually-addressable, I