I’ve got a video of the Nutcracker Russian music below that I took from the house. It’s not really that bright, the camera just doesn’t adjust that well to low light. Needless to say, we’re only showing them between 6-8 until the holidays.

I hope to program some slower songs tomorrow and get a good 5 songs playing on rotation by the weekend. If you’re in the area, come on by!

I found this great tutorial online for animating lights and pretty much followed it word for word. in a nutshell, you’ll run your lights to 8 separate power strips, which you’ll be modifying with a wire to your controller. This whole process took me around 3 hours after the lights were fully hung. It’s really not as tricky as it sounds.

Each power strip has three wires to the power outlet, green, black and white. First we cut the wire in half, strip the insulation and cut out the green wire (not used since we can’t ground the lights). The black wire is then stripped and connected back to itself with wire twists.

Finally, the white wire split between two new wires which run to the controller. I used outdoor lighting wire but you could use any 16 gauge wire you like. The new wire breaks the circuit, the lights won’t turn on until the new wire connects. That’s what the controller will be doing, acting like a light switch which we can program from the computer.

I drew up a little flowchart to show you how the wiring looks with one string of lights. If you wanted more detailed instructions, check out the tutorial from KSO Christmas lights. They have much more images and wiring instructions.

There’s some pretty expensive FM broadcasting equipment out there, but I only needed to hit a few hundred feet. I chose to go with the Belkin Tunecast II modification. It’s a pretty cheap little device, $30 or so, which is normally designed to plug into an iPod for playing music in your car. It runs on AAA batteries and has a little power saving thing which automatically turns on when music is played, then off if no music plays for 60 seconds. With a little modification, you can boost the signal to easily cover your street.

There’s a great walkthrough on Instructables, but in a nutshell, you’ll need to take off the battery cover and unscrew a single screw. This will allow you to pop off the shell and expose the circuit board. There’s one more screw you’ll need to remove, but then you’ll have full access to everything you need.

The antenna used by default is a blue wire soldered to the board and wrapped in the cable that connects to your iPod. All you need to do is desolder this blue wire, it even says ANT on the board where you do it, and solder on your own. I chose some medium gauge speaker wire around 4ft long, just happened to have some on hand. You could solder in an extendable antenna if you want, I didn’t need that for this application though.

To get the case back on, I had to dremel out a bit for where the new antenna wire would go, and applied some electrical tape over the power connectors just in case they rubbed with the antenna. Then it was as easy as screwing things back together and snapping the shell back on. I can easily get a signal a few houses down from my garage, more than enough range for me.

Maybe the pros can do it in their heads, but as I’ve found the last few weeks, creating a light display is much like writing music. The music is your score, each string of lights is a note which can be played long or short. As a web developer with some experience with Flash, I naturally wanted to create something to see how it was going to look.

Here’s an example of what one of the songs should look like. This one is Chiron Beta Prime by the great Jonathan Coulton. I took the photo of the house from my iPhone and cut the lights into separate layers in Photoshop then exported them into Flash. I should be able to use the Flash score to pretty much dictate what Vixen should look like. I hope to start programming it this weekend. Wish me luck!

So here’s a pic of the house at night, taken by iPhone so excuse the bad quality. There’s a total of 3000 or so lights now, including the star in the middle. I think next year we’ll add a few more lines, especially the top of the roof and the trim. Maybe add something to the lawn, it’s kinda lonely out there.

I used this great tool for hanging the lights on the gutters and shingles. Picked it up at Target, but you can find them online. It lets you hang lights up 18ft with an extendable pole. The little clips work great for the gutters, and just ok for the shingles. But for $20 and a few hours, sure beats the ladder approach.

I’ll be running Vixen to control the lights. This is a Windows app that syncs music to my sequences and will control the lights turning them on and off, dimming and effects as well if I had a better controller. I’m going to try and run it from my Mac, I don’t have a PC in the house, with a usb to parallel adapter. Should give that a try this week with a sample string of lights, I’ll post video if it works.

The lights are almost all up on the house, just a couple bushes and the top trim and snowflake to go. I’ll be running a little over 3000 lights this year, good starting point I think. Maybe next year I’ll be able to grab a more advanced controller and will have a need for some extra lights to add to the additional channels.

Last year we were living in Sunnyvale and came up to a house with lights that was seemingly possessed. Things were just blinking like mad, no real pattern or synchronization. We noticed there was a sign in the front lawn that read “Tune to 101.7.” Then everything became clear.

The lights at the house were changing in time with the music. Each string would turn on and off with the beat, or the lyric, or the melody. It was the first time I’d seen anything like that outside of a Disneyland show or on YouTube. I was impressed someone could do so much with what I’d assumed were very limited resources.

Amazing Grace Techno – Computer Controlled Christmas Lights from Richard Holdman on Vimeo.
Very much out of my league, but this is the “best of class” example

When we moved to Chapel Hill, I started thinking about how I could repeat the experience I had with my new neighbors. I did a little research over the Summer and started really planning things out in Fall. We were going to start small this year with just a few lights and a few songs, test the waters a bit. Luckily there’s a great community of people doing this stuff so there’s no lack of information out there.

Unfortunately, most of the resources I found were designed for people who knew what they were doing already. Lots of schematics, pcb wiring layouts and parts lists, all do it yourself style. I’m no electrical engineer, this stuff scares me.

Luckily last week I came across KSO Christmas Lights, a friendly blog run by a guy who was in my same situation a few years ago. He wanted to put something together, but realized it would take more than a trip to Amazon. He has a great tutorial on how to animate christmas lights using an 8 channel controller, which I’m giving a try.

I’ve already ordered the controller and started planning out where the lights will go. I’ll keep posting on my progress and document everything so other people interested can learn without going through the deep searching I went through. Wish me luck!