Yes! I just started a new business that year called Living Light Shows. You can view our products and services here: http://www.livinglightshows.com.

The primary difference is that rather than being a display, it is a 10 minute show. Many houses you will see have music that they sequence their lights too, but if you look closely you will notice that the effects are often limited to blinking to the beat. In our show, I have tried not to ever have two parts of the show that are exactly the same. In the same way that a composer attempts to isolate individual instruments when composing a work of music, I tried to isolate specific elements within the yard that represented every instrument, beat, sound effect, buzz, whirl, etc. when sequencing so the end product throughout the whole show is truly a visual representation of what you are hearing rather than just blinking elements to the beat. I also have attempted to visually represent parts of the music with lights that are especially signficant, such as moments of rising tension and bass drops. I feel this really invokes emotion in the viewer and makes the show that much more entertaining. A famous musician once said that every note has been played, but it is how an individual compiles those notes together than allows us to continually have unique and beautiful new music.

We have about 300-500 Christmas lights and 6,181 Pixels. My goal in 2015 is to have 100% pixels.

TWO... What you say?! All pixels lights except for those powered off two 25 foot extension cords are running 12v over the same wire sending the signal to our pixels.

Traditional Christmas lights use an average of one to two controller channels per 100 lights. Our pixel lights use THREE HUNDRED controller channels per 100 lights. That means our controllers are pushing out the same "horsepower" as would be required for a show running nearly TWO MILLION traditional Christmas lights! We use 6 SanDevices e682 controllers to run all our lights.

In 2014, I wrote a custom software interface that allows viewers to send a text message of their name from their cell phone and it will scroll the name across two of our large pixel Jumbo-tron grids in 4 foot letters for everyone to see! This is a level of interactivity and technology we have never seen on any other house and has a great “cool” factor for the public since it makes them part of the show.

I get various forms of this question, but the short answer is I do Technology Consulting and Software Development for a living. I do not do anything like this as part of my job. I do enjoy the marrying of software to electonics though and this is a good outlet for that.

If you or anyone you know has a business requirement or inefficiency within your organization that you would like me to look at and see if we can resolve utilizing some form of technology (Software, Automation, etc.) then please contact me using the form below. I am also always interested in making new business contacts on LinkedIn as well, so please click here if you would like to connect!

Depending on how natural the creativity is flowing, I would say I average 6-10 hours of sequence programming for every 10 seconds of finished show.

I use an open source audio editor called Audacity.

I use an open source software product called Vixen 3.

I actually do not use a computer at all. Starting in 2014, my entire show is ran from a Raspberry Pi. The Raspberry Pi is a single board computer with no moving parts about the size of a credit card. I run software on it called the Falcon Pi Player. This product is an amazing technological acheivement. Using the Pi, I am able to run nearly 3 times the number of channels in my show than I was able to do with a Windows PC with 8GB RAM in 2013. What is really amazing about the Raspberry Pi is that it was invented by a professor at the University of Cambridge in the UK as an educational tool for children and only costs $35.

Our entire 10 minute light show and sound track are stored on a memory chip the size and thickness of your finger nail.

Another testament to the latest technology is that my show is EXTREMELY energy efficient. How efficient? The whole show requires HALF the power required to run a standard household hair dryer! Our show is approx. 742 watts, a hairdryer uses 1440 watts.

Our 2014 show is 10 minutes long. The entire show is on Youtube, it is not just a portion of it.

I am grouping all the "How To" questions into this one response because most of them can be answered by watching one of the videos below:

• Behind the Scenes Tour - This shows just about everything in the show including the Hardware, Controllers, Software, etc and how it all works together
• How I built my Leaping Arches
• How I built the Pixel Trees
• How I built the Pixel Matrix