Jon and Suzanne Back - already working on updates and changes for the 2021-2022 Season. It will be our 17th year of synchronized music and lighting. This year we will have over a dozen songs, so it may get spread across different days.
You "Listen to the Lights" by tuning your car's radio to FM 93.5 so that you can listen to our personal FM transmitter. If you forget the number, don't worry; there is a sign in the yard to remind you.
For 2020, we had approximately 80,000 lights (they are so much trouble to actually count) on the house and in the yard. Many of the lights (on the arches and on the roof and the garage door) can be any color by changing their Red, Green and Blue values, just like your TV picture.
The lights are computer controlled on roughly 653,000 independent channels spread across dozens of different types of controllers. The master computer driving the display and music is a Raspberry Pi. That master computer is controlling nine controllers scattered through the display.
Programming is done using the free (and so much fun) software called xLights. (https://xlights.org)
The display has gotten complex enough that it takes more than 800 DMX Universes to control all the lights. It took a lot of planning and updates, but my display has never been more precise and dependable. Worth the effort, for sure.
