–I just posted this to my “HOLIDAY LIGHTS” page but wanted to make a post of it as well.–

The lights are up, the show is on and the neighbors are envious! I might have even outdone Clark Griswold!…. Ok maybe not.

It is pretty amazing that the Halloween show is done at this point. I’ve spent many hours, days and weeks working on perfecting it. I’ve visited numerous forums and during that time I saw one quote that I love.

“If you are so smart then why don’t you hook up the lights!”

Syncing your lights to music really is a fun experience for those that want to take it on. The costs to do so are pretty expensive the first year even for a basic setup. Some things are overlooked in terms of pricing. For example, I use a Light-O-Rama controller to control the lights. The first year the cost of the controller hits your budget hard at approx $300, but that does come with the converter and software. Then you figure you can control 16 different lights, but suddenly you now need to purchase 16 extension cords that can range from $10 – $25 each depending on how far they need to stretch. Oh yeah, then you need lights to plug in. Not to mention the amount of time it takes to plan and actually figure out where each light will go.

Once you have your plan the rest is tedious. Actually syncing up the lights to music. Some people do this first but I think it’s important to know where your lights are before you begin this step. To sync the lights up I use the Light-O-Rama software and generally start with 1/10 of a second timing blocks. Below you can see a sample. What this shows is part of my sequence for the song “Thriller” by Michael Jackson. What you see on the image is approx 5 seconds of light activity. Each time you see a color in a cell the lights are being turned on, off, flashed or shimmered. The process to create the sequences can take between 2 hours all the way up to 12 hours for a basic 16 channel controller. Some people have 100+ channels and they say it takes 20+ hours to make a song, to them I say you have lost your mind!

Now, for those that don’t want to create their own sequences you can download pre-made ones at places like “LORSequences.com” or just google LOR sequence download and you’ll find many hits. But when you do that it won’t look right unless your lights are setup exactly like the persons who created the sequence. I wasted many hours trying to adapt and finally created my own from scratch.

The entire system really isn’t as complex as you might think. I made the image below to explain how it works. As you can see, there is a main computer that runs the system. The computer talks to a USB adapter that is connected via CAT5 cable to the controller. Every light in our yard is plugged into one of the 16 outlets on the controller.

Now, what we do is schedule the show to run at a particular time, in my case 7:00pm-10:00pm nightly. At 7:00pm the computer automatically runs the preconfigured sequence and every time one of the boxes in the computer program has a color in it that is translated into a command and sent to the controller who in turn triggers the light to do that command.

The commands we are able to have the lights do include: dimming, fading, twinkling, shimmering, etc.

Initially I had planned on using LED or fluorescent flood lights to save some energy. However because LED and fluorescent operate at such a lower wattage the fade and dim commands just didn’t work right so I had to go to the standard 85 watt bulbs.

We really don’t know our neighbors that well but we know we don’t want to make them made as it is a pretty nice neighborhood so rather then blast our music over speakers in our front yard we opted to purchase a FM transmitter. This transmitter allows us to feed the audio from the computer into the FM band and broadcast on a number of frequencies. For us we found that 99.7 was the best frequency as it was open with enough buffer on both sides to prevent bleed over. This way our guests can sit in their cars out front and watch the show hearing it over their car radio. It really is a great system and we found the transmitter will actually broadcast to the bottom of the hill!

The transmitter I am using is a Ramsey FM25B (pictured below). These transmitters generally come in “kits” and must be assembled by the user per FCC rules. In fact no pre-built FM transmitter can be sold by law to a civilian for public use. Seeing how my soldering skills were not the best I found that ChristmasinCruces.com had the unit and you could pay them to assemble it for the cheapest price I found anywhere. So I do recommend going with them if you need an FM transmitter. You can get a link to their FM transmitter section of their store by clicking HERE. Please keep in mind that whenever you use an FM transmitter there are laws that MUST be followed. I am a licensed amateur radio operator and most of the laws seem like they are common sense, but please ensure you do your homework and understand them before using one of these. If you don’t and you start interfering with licensed stations broadcasts, bleeding over to other stations or simply overpowering them you might be in violation of the law and that is much more expensive then assembling any light show!

Putting on a show like this does have it’s challenges. As it was the first year for me I discovered a lot of what doesn’t work well and what does. There definitely is a learning curve to this such as finding out LEDs don’t work for the purpose I was hoping they would, and that if you go overboard with your light commands you can almost guarantee that you will put someone into an epileptic seizure (no I haven’t done this!). But the more you play the more you learn. There really is nothing like sitting outside and watching all the work you put into it come together.

So far thanks to the lights I’ve meet a few neighbors, and even had some neighborhood kids yell from their parents car “your house looks cool!!” as they drove by. It looks like the neighbors approve and hopefully we can entice others in the neighborhood to participate in Halloween this year.

If you are interested in putting together a show like this I want to encourage you to do so. Keep in mind however that it is pricey the first year. After that you get to reuse your high dollar items so keep that in mind. If you would like to learn more about how this works or need help feel free to email me using the contact me page or you can browse the following sites that I think are very useful and in fact have used many times myself over the past few months.

Getting Help

• PlanetChristmas chatroom. Chat with thousands of other Christmas lighting enthusiasts that know their stuff! Decorators that have been featured on national television congregate on this forum. Learn from the experts and do it right.
• Light-o-Rama Wiki – If you plan on using Light-o-Rama for your display, consider checking this out.
• LORSequrnces. – This is where you can download preconfigured LOR sequences shared by some of the LOR user community.
• Light O Rama Forums - Need help? Want to see what others are up to? This is definitely the place. I had an issue with my controller and within 3 hours had 2 people offering advice to get me back up and running.

Keep in mind that I am not a business or a professional lighting guy. I am merely a computer Geek that found a way to use his computer to power his lights. I don’t sell anything or make profit doing this. This light show is done strictly for fun to entertain myself and my neighbors. Any advice here is simply information that you can choose to use but I hold no liability or risk should you follow anything I say no matter how senseless it may be.