About The Show

For those curious about what's "behind the curtain" stay tuned as we're working to put more information out!

The Software

There is a variety of software that goes into making an amazing display like ours. We're proud to say all the software we use is free and open source, developed by the lighting enthusiast community! To design and program the display we use a software called xLights. The image to the right is a snippet of our layout, each and every light on our house is represented in this layout all 16,863 of them!

When it show time comes all the carefully planned out lighting animations and soundtracks are played back using a software called Falcon Pi Player.

The Hardware

The Lights:

We're using 8,533 individually addressable LED lights, each light has an embedded controller. These are commonly referred to as ws2811 nodes or pixels. In addition to the individually addressable we use 16 RGB display panels commonly referred to as P10 panels. These are what create the high density display/TV featured in the show. Both these panels and the ws2811 nodes run off of 5V DC as opposed to the typical outlet voltage, this makes them incredibly efficient with an entire evening of lighting consuming less than 3 kWh.

The Controllers:

The entire show is controlled by a single Raspberry Pi, this holds all the audio and lighting sequences and knows when to play them. The raspberry pi does not have any lights plugged into it though, rather it sends the lighting data out over a local network to multiple other controllers. We are currently using two Falcon Controllers, an F4V3 and an F48 with many receiver boards. Between these two controllers we are using 47 unique outputs, each controlling anywhere from as little as 7 LED's up to 820 on the longest string of lights! To drive the P10 panels we are using a Colorlight 5A-75B v8 Panel Controller.