California man builds incredibly dynamic seasonal display

Over the years, Turner has grown his displays to include fully playable video games. He has put together Guitar Hero–based games for both Christmas and Halloween, which use the familiar PlayStation 3 controller, and he created a Christmas-time takeoff of Angry Birds last year.

Turner’s 2012 holiday lightshow — dubbed the “aMAZEing light show ” — was loosely inspired by Major Havoc, a vector-based arcade game from the early 1980s.

Powered by 192 controlled channels, the aMAZEing light show features approximately 16,000 lights. New in this year’s show are individually-controlled RGB pixel strings, which are controlled with SanDevices boards that receive DMX over Ethernet sent from master Light-o-rama programs.

Turner does all of the building, programming, and soldering himself, and he has quite a bit of expertise in the area. As a production designer and technical director for Walt Disney Imagineering, he has created special effects for theme park attractions and shows such as Space Mountain and The Haunted Mansion.

Every year I leave it up to Santa’s Elves (Figure 1) to fix my broken Christmas lights but now they are demanding technician grade salaries and overtime. This year I am using the “Light-Keeper–Pro” to make my life easier. Why a $20 investment in a “tester” when a new set of Christmas lights is less than $10?

We still use the incandescent miniature lamps as they have a softer glow in comparison to the new LED lighting.

“Here’s how vendors eliminated the extreme frustration of an entire string’s going dark, leaving you to frantically search for that one bulb that’s the culprit. As in a conventional bulb, the filament of each bulb attaches to the two support wires that carry the current through the bulb. Just below the active filament is a specially coated, conductive shunt wire, which also attaches to the supports.

“Normally the bulbs have a “shunt” which shorts the bulb when it experiences full line voltage. That leaves the bad bulb OFF, and the rest of that circuit ON, which shows which bulb to replace. Unfortunately, the shunt often fails to operate, and then an entire circuit is off.”

[Chris] over at PyroElectro is getting into the swing of the holidays with a LED Christmas tree build. Unlike the other electrical Christmas trees we’ve seen this holiday season, [Chris] designed his tree entirely with digital logic – no microcontrollers included.

a good idea to build an LED Christmas tree and ended up building a great looking tree that’s also very simple.

With the help of a microcontroller, a few strings of GE Color Effect Christmas lights can be easily turned into a fully programmable LED strip, or if you are so inclined, a huge RGB LED display. [Hubbe] had a few strings of these Color Effect Christmas lights, but didn’t want to spend the time arranging his light strings in an array simply to get a programmable display. His solution to this problem – the Chaos Display – turns strings of Christmas lights randomly thrown on a tree into a fully programmable display capable of displaying text and images.

The Chaos Display
Got Pike?
Or, how to display videos on randomly organized xmas lights.
distributed under the terms of the GPL license.
http://fredrik.hubbe.net/chaosdisplay/