Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and how the tech are you. It's the holiday season, That's all I'm allowed to sing by law, But in my neck of the woods that means an awful lot of my neighbors have gone over the top with various holiday displays. Now predominantly the holiday celebrated in my neck of the woods is Christmas, And for simplicity's sake, I'll be talking a lot about Christmas lights in this episode. But keep in mind that, you know, obviously people do light shows for all sorts of different holidays, but just for simplicity's sake, I'm going to say Christmas lights because that's what the hobby is largely centered around. And today I really wanted to talk about how people who create those really spectacular light displays, the kind that often are coordinated with music, how they pull that off. And it takes an awful lot of technology. More than that, this technology evolves an incredible pace. The way that people can do this now is far more sophisticated than what was done even just a couple of years ago. So the other thing to keep in mind is if you're listening to this episode after twenty twenty four, there's going to be some dated stuff in here. That's kind of how tech works, and it's really sophisticated, both from a hardware and a software side of things. And yeah, we're going to really dive into this, but on a high level because, as it turns out, if you really really want to get into this stuff, it's going to take some time on your part to really get acquainted with all the nuances. If you want a glimpse at how advanced this tech is, you should look up Christmas lights shows on YouTube. Some of those displays are truly dropping, and of course some people do them for Halloween as well. There's a real bustling community of hobbyists on YouTube with tutorials and product reviews for people in the space. I'll be talking about a few different YouTube channels. For example, Listen to lights or how to Pixel. That's the number two, so how to Pixel. They can give you a lot of information on the technology, the hobby, how to get started and want to watch out for. But before we go any further, let's talk about old school Christmas lights because when I was a kid, the Christmas lights I had they could not do the things that we're seeing these displays do. So in ye olden days of electric Christmas lights, you would buy a string of lights that were wired in series. Now, when we talk about circuits, one way that you can classify simple circuits is by whether they're wired in series or in parallel. Here's a quick refresher course on that in case it's been a while since you've learned about this in science class. So let's start with a power source. The power source provides voltage. This is akin to pressure in the system that's using water or air. That's how much oomph is behind the current. So the higher the voltage, the greater the pressure behind the push of electricity. So a battery typically has you know, fairly low voltage, like a like a little portable battery. It's something you would put in one of your handheld devices. So those are usually around one and a half volts. The outlet in your typical house, at least here in the United States, provides around one hundred and twenty volts of pressure. Now I say in the United States because in other places like say the United Kingdom, it's different. The UK household outlet goes to two hundred and thirty volts. By the way, this is one of the reasons why it's important to use a converter when connecting to outlets in other countries, because you do not want to fry your gear anyway. This pressure is what pushes electricity through a circuit, which you can think of ultimately as a big old loop. That's what a circuit is. It's just a loop. The path goes from one terminal of your power supply and ultimately comes back to connect at a different terminal of that same power supply, and this makes a complete circuit. Now, if it were just a path, that wouldn't be very useful, right, if it was just a loop of wire, I mean it would be useful if you wanted to generate heat, because the circuit would start to get really hot and then eventually melt or catch fire. Then you would be pretty much set because the resistance of the pathway, the electrical resistance, would mean that some of that electrical energy would be transformed into heat, and then if left long enough, it'll heat up enough to really do some damage. Now, instead we connect other stuff to circuits, you know, like light bulbs, for example, and the electricity in the circuit powers the light bulb in your old fashioned incandescent light bulbs. The way this worked is that electricity would flow through a tiny little filament inside the bulb and heat that filament to a point where it would incandesce or light up. This filament would be connect to a pair of electrodes, and then the current could continue on the pathway and go to the next light bulb in the series. We call these elements the load on the circuit, and the load can't exceed what the voltage is capable of doing, or else things won't work out so well. It's kind of like you can push, say a heavy cart, up an incline. You can push it pretty well until it reaches a certain weight, and then your strength just isn't enough to push it up the incline. Same thing with voltage. If you add too much of a load on your circuit and the voltage can't get the job done, then you don't get a really good result. If you've ever used a battery powered device while the batteries were running out of juice, you kind of experienced this. You know, flashlights get dimmer before going out, and electric shavers start to lose their buzz. You get the picture. But as long as the load on a circuit is compatible with the voltage supplied, you're in business. So let's talk about series versus parallel. In a series circuit, each load follows the one before it. It's more like a direct line from the power supply to load one, and then from load one to load two, and so on until you get to the end where the path reconnects with the other tumble all the power supply. That means that power could come through the wire to light bulb number one, then continue to light bulb number two, and so on and so forth until you get to the end of the string, and you might plug a second string into the first, which continues the circuit. This is a pretty straightforward and simple approach, but there is one major problem. If a single light bulb burns out somewhere along that string, it breaks the whole circuit and everything goes dark. It's like if you turn the switch to off instead of on, the filament in that burnt out bulb breaks apart. Essentially, it burns through and that means the electricity no longer has a path it can follow. It's what we would call an open circuit. You have to find the burnt out bulb and replace it in order to repair the circuit and get things working again. It could be a real hassle. Same thing could come true if a light bulb becomes loose in its socket and it doesn't have a good connection. Same issue. At least in that case, you're not having to replace the bulb. You just have to figure out which one's lucy goosey in its socket. This is also why the Netflix series Stranger Things presented a real challenge to electricians like John Hilton, who worked on the series. Hilton appeared on an episode of Tech Stuff in the Past It's a great episode and we talked about this challenge. So Hilton and Jess Royal from the series talked about what it was like working on there from behind the scenes, and Hilton explained that the story required fine tune manipulation of a string of Christmas lights. So a character caught in the upside down would use Christmas lights to communicate with his mother by lighting up very specific bulbs on a string. But, as Hilton explained, that's kind of the opposite of how these old Christmas lights worked. You know, you can't just turn off or on a single bulb. They're either all on or they're all off. So to achieve the effect in the series, Hilton had to actually individually wire each bulb in a string to an electric board so they look like they were wired together, but they weren't. They were each wired separately, and from that electric board he could manipulate the bulbs individually by turning off or on the power to that specific bulb. However, he also had to make it look like it was a normal string of nineteen eighties era Christmas lights, which meant he had to find ways to hide all those individual wires running from each bulb to his control board, which is not an easy task, especially even if you're sitting there and only wiring up the lights that are going to be used to communicate. Like you figure out, oh they never use the letter K or Q or whatever, it's still a whole bunch of wires to deal with. Now, I did mention that you could also wire circuits in parallel. Now, I imagine in this case that rather than having each bulb connected in a straight line on that circuit. You have a pair of wires connected to each bulb that then you know, branches off from the main circuit path. So instead of a string which is just one bulb after the other, it's more like a string in which there's kind of a turnoff for bulb number one, but if you just keep going down the string, you'll come to the turnoff for bulb number two and so on. These bulbs are in a way, they're isolated from one another. And a big benefit to this approach is that if a single bulb burns out, the path is unbroken for the rest of the string, so your entire string doesn't go dark. You would still have one dark bulb, but you would have to replace that, but everything else would still be lit up. Now, some Christmas lights are wired in what's called series parallel, all right, So this means you have multiple strings of lights wired in series, but collectively, each individual string of lights are in parallel with one another. So let's say there's like four parallel strings of lights and one of those strings goes out, the other three would remain lit up, so you would have a section go dark, but the rest of your lights would still be lit up and that's series parallel. It's part and part right within a series string. Any light going out makes the rest of that string go out, but the rest of the parallel strings remain lit up. You know. That's how it used to be, right that if a light goes out, then you're kind of up the creek. More recently, Christmas lights have included an element called a shunt, which helps. So this is something that creates a path of lower resistance in an electric circuit, and electricity will follow the path of least resistance. Electricity is a lot like me. If there's a task that requires effort, I'm likely to seek out the way in which I can expend the least amount of energy to complete that task, even if that means I don't do as good a job in the process. If my bosses are listening, I was only kidding. So the shunts in Christmas lights are wires connected to the electrodes. So remember I mentioned that a filament connects two electrodes together, and then electricity, you know, flows through the filament and heats it up and incandesces and that's where you get your light and your old incandescent lights. Eventually, the filament will burn out. It just it burns through and breaks, and then you don't have a path anymore. Well, the shunt acts as a secondary connection between those two electrons, but it has a higher resistance than the filament. So normally electricity will flow through the filament because again it follows the path of least resistance. But if the filament breaks, now it'll flow through the shunt because even though it had a higher electrical resistance, it still represents a viable path. And if there is a viable path, electricity will take it. And so the show goes on. Since I'm talking about shunts, I should also take a moment to talk about fuses. So a fuse is a safety measure. The fuse is there to make sure that if something really unexpected happens, like let's say there's a surge in electricity, the voltage suddenly changes very dramatically, you don't want that to cause more problems. You don't want that to create like a fire hazard, for example. So the fuse allows electricity to flow through under normal conditions, but if it's under a more extreme circumstance, the fuze will break, kind of like the filament does once it burns out. But the fuse is designed to break on purpose once voltage exceeds a certain level, so it's like a limit on how much it can allow through, and if the incoming voltage exceeds that, the fuse trips, so you don't end up with a real catastrophe on your hands. It's just an open circuit so the electricity doesn't flow through. In Christmas lights, you can typically find fuses near the plug where it plugs into either the wall or another string of Christmas lights. In some of these lights, you can actually replace the fuse if it does burn out. I have never done this personally, so I have no clue as to how challenging or easy it is to do this, though these days with my eyesight, I imagine it'd be devilishly tricky if I don't have my peepers on. One other thing that I should mention is the transition from incandescent bulbs to LED bulbs. So incandescent bulbs that was what we had when I was a kid, those big Christmas lights. We even had bubblers disslights that would include liquid in a little vial that would bubble as the light would heat the liquid up. It was really neat or I thought it was really neat. But in stranger things. You know, the crew were working with these old incandescent bulbs because again that's what we had in the nineteen eighties. But these days Christmas lights tend to be LEDs, light emitting diodes. Now that's great for lots of different reasons. One is that LEDs need way less energy to generate light, something like seventy percent less than incandescent strings, which is both good for the environment. It's also good for your wallet because you won't be footing a massive electricity bill just to keep your house all holly jolly. Also, LED bulbs last a whole lot longer than incandescent bulbs do. And you can even create strings of LED lights in which each LED can be turned on or off individually. That's advanced level stuff that we're going to talk about. Now. Your typical LED string of lights you can't do that. They're not designed to do that. They just plug into your wall, they all come on. They might have a simple controller on them that allows them to do things like dim and brighten or twinkle or flash those kinds of things. That's basic level stuff. Serious hobbyists get into the individually controllable LED bulbs, where each LED bulb has its own microchip, which in turn has to be wired to a controller. When we talk about addresses and stuff, we'll get more into that, because that's kind of like the advanced level thing. On a side note, those last types of LEDs aren't something you're going to find in your typical big box stores. Those Christmas lights tend to be far simpler in design. Those are like the off the shelf things that you'll find in your basic retail store. Some retail stores are selling kits for holiday light shows, but they tend to be proprietary, and at least in the hobbyist field, the serious hobbyists tend to look down on those kits. One because they don't have as much flexibility. You can't incorporate things that are outside those proprietary kits to work with them. Another is that there's at least an opinion, a fairly prevalent opinion, and the hobbyists that I listened to as I was listening to podcasts and watching videos and stuff, who feel that the quality of those products is lower than what you'll get if you're doing things yourself, and that a lot of those things will break down after a season or two and that it just gets really expensive and wasteful. So your mileage may vary, but that's what I heard. So most of the hobby blogs and videos that I encountered suggested that you should order straight from where the lights are manufactured, which is China. They also warned that this also comes with its own risks. If something doesn't work correctly, it may be difficult or even impossible to return the lights to get working ones, so you have to be really careful to make sure that you're ordering from a reputable seller. But yeah, the LEDs that serious hobbyists use typically are meant for stuff like digital disp lays and signage where you need to be able to control individual lights in order to spell things out right like roadwork ahead or whatever it may be, except you're using it to make frosty, you know, melt or something. I don't know what you do for your Christmas lights displays. So these have just been repurposed to be really a holly jolly kind of approach. And now we're going to take a quick break. When we come back, I'm going to talk about some more details of the early days of Christmas lights show as a hobby, so we're back now. In the early days, light show hobbyists ran into problems similar to those of the Stranger Things Crew. The old style Christmas lights could only be controlled by the string rather by the individual bulb, So you could turn a string of lights off or on, and that was relatively simple on a high It just meant that you had to control the electricity that was going to that particular string. You know, you turned the electricity off, the lights go off, you turn it on, the lights come on. That's it. The old lights had no ability to change color either. If you wanted to create an effect of a color change, then it meant that you actually had to use multiple strings of lights. Like let's say you wanted to outline a window frame outside your house in lights and create an effect that those lights are changing from red to green. Well, you would actually have to use strings of red lights to outline the frame and then strings of green lights to outline the frame, and then you would just have to alternate which string was getting power at what time in order to get that effect of red changing to green and green changing to red. Modern led lights often have RGB red green and blue elements inside each bulb, meaning that you control the concentration of what kind of light is allowed to be emitted, so you can actually change the color within a single string of lights. Now you don't have to double up or triple up whatever it may be, which does simplify things at least from a wiring perspective, not necessarily from the programming perspective. As for controlling which string received power at any given time, well, you would need to run your lights to a controller box. So essentially this box acts as a switch, and in the old days it is simply just switched power going from one outlet connected to one set of lights or a different outlet. The strings of lights would attach to the controller box. But the controller is just a tool. It doesn't know when it's supposed to switch stuff on or off on its own. It has to be programmed. And with a program, the controller follows a preset series of instructions a sequence in order to achieve whatever the effect was that was desired. Again, those early variations essentially just being which strings of lights were on or off at any given moment. Now, as we'll see, if you really want to go all out for the holidays, you could get wicked complicated with your setup, but let's start with the simple stuff. So let's say you've got your strings of lights hung with care on your home. You know, the trees, the family dog, whatever it might be, And now you want to create a sequence for these lights to follow. They shouldn't just twinkle or stay on. They should go on and off according to your whimsical nature, perhaps creating animated effects or spelling stuff out. Even it takes an awful lot of technology and effort to enable whimsy. As it turns out, we aren't all like Willy Waka, where things just magically happen. So the world of hobbyists Christmas lights shows ends up borrowing a lot of technology and technique from the world of stage lighting. Now, if you've ever been to a big professional theatrical production like a Broadway show or an arena concert, you've likely seen some pretty amazing lighting effects, like entire banks of lights might sweep around and focus on a specific spot, or create interesting patterns on the background, or all sorts of other effects. To achieve that, and not to have five hundred stage hands manually controlling every light with precision, you need some special circuit boards. Now I mentioned a controller earlier. These are large logic boards that the direct power or commands to specific elements according to a pre program set of instructions. Now, before we get into those more, let's talk about LEDs. Let's say that you've gone all out. You've decided to get the LEDs that you're able to control one bulb at a time. Each of these bulbs can create any number of colors using a variation of the red, green, and blue elements that are inside each bulb. Essentially, these bulbs are pixels, just like you would have on a television or other display. Each light bulb represents one point of light, and by controlling them collectively, you can create different shapes, including words. The pixel lights typically will be able again to create pretty much any color you want. Some Christmas lights sequencer programs refer to these pixels as nodes. Technically, a node is any singular controllable element in a show. So let's say that you have a string of lights that's an old style string right the series lights where you can't control individual light bulbs, that string would be a node. But if you do have bulbs that can be controlled individually, each bulb would be a node, So it all depends on what are you controlling. Whether it's a string or a single light bulb, each one would be a single node. These lights have a different kind of plug, the fancy led ones, they have a different kind of plug than the ones you would find on your regular old Christmas light strings. You wouldn't plug them into the wall. And it makes sense because these lights have to be able to accept digital commands. So you know, you have your wires that are in charge of carrying the electricity to the bulbs, but you also need to be able to control data. So it's a three pin plug and it's designed to plug into a controller. The controllers themselves come in several varieties. You can purchase components separately. You can actually, you know, buy a circuit board controller unit and you know, an old like power box, waterproof power box and mount your circuit board inside the power box along with a power supply and some other elements. It's a lot like building a PC from basic components if you have ever done that, where you order all the different elements from different companies whatever, assuming that you've made sure that they're all going to be compatible, and then you mount them in the case and then you turn it on and hope that it works. Similar thing there. However, nowadays quite a few companies are offering fully built out controller systems, like ready to play controller systems, so that you don't have to do any of that stuff yourself. Now, you're likely going to be paying more for a ready to run style controller, but not that much more. The gap between doing it yourself and the stuff that's already been assembled, it's not huge, and if you value your time a lot, then you may say, hey, it makes way more sense for me to buy this ready made solution as opposed to trying to do it myself. If, however, you get lots of joy and satisfaction out of doing it yourself, that's a completely legitimate reason to do it. You're just not going to save that much money. You will save a little now. One thing the controller is going to need is obviously power, so figuring out how to run a power supply to a controller is an important step. It's also important that that power supply is weather proofed, so in the old days, like I said, you might mount a power supply like the kind you would use with a PC inside the power box along with the controller's circuit board and just run power from the box to the circuit board, then cables connecting to the power source that would then run to say, an outlet in your home, or you might buy a weather proofed power source that can sit on the ground and then run a cable from that to your controller. But yeah, that power ends up going to the controller, which then can send power out to the various elements connected to your show. But yeah, figuring that out is really important. Really complex displays may actually use multiple controllers. Some may use several big controllers or lots of small ones, or a combination of the two. That obviously necessitates multiple power solutions to make everything work and not become like a tripping hazard for everyone living in the home. That itself can be a huge challenge. Typically, you also have to connect another device like a computer to the controller. In the old days, you had to have in the old days being like three years ago, you had to have your computer connected to the controller so that you could send the sequence the show to the controller so that it then could send the commands out to all the different elements. Because again, the controller doesn't have any real intelligence itself. It just knows where to send instructions at what time to what element, but it has to get those instructions from somewhere. Typically that was a computer. Now these days you can get a device that often is referenced as a show player. In a way, it's kind of like a dry that stores show instructions and it will take on the role of the computer. Like you have to still program the show on your computer, but you then send that program to the show player, which stores the program, and then when it's the right time to initiate, it will send all the commands to the controller, which then sends those signals to the various elements in your Christmas show. If your display has elements that are really far away from the controller, and by far i'm talking like maybe more than twenty five feet, then you'll also probably have to use receivers. I mean, you could use different controllers for different elements so that you know no element is more than twenty five feet away from its controller, But that gets really complicated. Receivers receive a signal from the controller and then send it further along the chain, which allows you to have certain show elements that would be further away from the controller. So you have a really big yard, for example, and you want to run elements way out to trees or in the front, as well as all the stuff that's in your you know, on your house itself. That might be something that you would have to look into. Another component you'll probably need is a radio transmitter in the FM band of frequencies. Now, this is so that the people driving up to watch your display can tune into a particular radio station to hear the accompanying music. Some displays also make use of outdoor speaker systems that will play music, you know, not as a super high volume at least if you have any consideration for your neighbors, but within the actual environment, so people walking up could hear the music too. However, if you're going to use a radio transmitter, there are certain rules you have to follow. So countries have very strict laws regarding radio frequency bands and who can use them and what they can be used for. And in order to have permission to broadcast on certain bands like the FM radio frequency band, typically you need to secure a license, which is incredibly expensive. However, if your transmission is under a certain power, you're okay. So here in the United States, the rule is if you're staying under point zero one microwatts of power at three meters, you're good to go, and you can choose the frequency band you want to broadcast on. You would need to choose something other than a radio station currently in use in your area or else your broadcast is going to be completely overpowered, and then you need to alert folks that they should tune their car radios to that specific channel. The transmitter's job is to transmit the signal sent to it over the radio, and the signal ideally is some Christmas music that you have coordinated with the program light display during the actual sequencing or programming phase, so it's another component. Also, the music obviously ends up being something that gets sent to the show player as well. It's all part of the program. Really, you could think of it as almost like a video where you've got the audio and the video stuff all synced up. It's similar to that. One other element you'll need, and you'll need several of these depending on what you want to do, is some sort of mounting material for the lights. So this is essentially a frame through which you plug the light bulbs in so that each pixel is held in the right position relative to its neighbors. Now that probably sounds obvious. If you're controlling bulbs pixel by pixel, The only way it works is if all the pixels maintain their relative position to one another. So you might use strips of plastic with holes cut through to push the bulbs into. You could create shapes that you wanted to in order, like do your own so that you get the effects to have stuff light up, but those are really hard, Like I mean, if you wanted to make a snowman or a reindeer or crampus or whatever, doing it yourself is extremely challenging. These are often referred to as props, and the nice thing is you can buy props like the hobby. There's tons of props that are available in different shapes. So if you want candy canes, no problem. You can get candy cane shapes and these props frequently you can actually get the digital equivalent of the prop to be plugged into your sequencing software so that your computer automatically recognizes these prop shapes and how they are lined up. So the props tend to come with instructions on how you are to install those pixels, how you plug the digital pixels in where you start, where you end what pattern you want to follow, and then that gets sent to the computer software. And the computer software already knows where each of those pixels are in relation to each other, so that way, when you run a program through it, it displays properly on the prop. Because that you have to tell the pixels where they live, you have to create addresses. So yeah, for programs to even work, lights have to have an address. Each light has its own address. This as much like your computer or your smartphone has an IP address on the Internet. Similar thing. For the controller to know which bulbs to turn on and off, those bulbs have to have an address. Otherwise you would just have random patterns being shown, and if your bulbs weren't in the right position, it would just look like a mess. So the standard that the lighting industry here in the United States uses is called DMX or sometimes DMX five twelve. The lighting industry in stage and concert productions developed the standard over a number of years in order to streamline control processes because before that standard, lighting technicians had to deal with lots of different proprietary methods to control different elements on the lighting board. That was really complicated and it meant it was a real pain in the butt to set up and break down. It was a nightmare from a wiring perspective. DMX five twelve simplified matters. So essentially, every device, every node will if you will, gets a DMX address. Now, some devices actually receive more than one address. For example, let's say you've got a light mounted in a system and the light has the ability to dim, well, the dimmer is on an address. If the mounted system can tilt, well, you've got tilt controls. That requires another address, and so on. So depending on how much an element can do, if it can pan left and right, well, then you need addresses for that. It's not necessarily a one to one system. In other words, it all depends on the number of effects the device is capable of producing. Each effect needs to have its own address so the controller can send the correct signal to that element at the right time. Now I could do an entire episode on DMX and the technologies associated with it and not even touch on the fact that there's also the music artist DMX, but that's getting away from our conversation about Christmas light shows. What you need to know is that DMX five twelve makes it possible to quantify and control each pixel in a display, and since it's a standard, you don't have to worry about proprietary issues, assuming you haven't bought into some proprietary string of lights controller system. Again, that's why Obvious often will buy direct from China to get these elements that can work with the open standards of DMX five twelve as opposed to some proprietary approach where it only works with that one company's equipment, because you want to be able to incorporate whatever elements you like and not be limited to what some company has created. Now let's talk about software. There are a few different software packages out there that let you program at Christmas lights show. People have their favorites. They all are trying to do the same thing, but the user interface is quite different from software to software. Some people prefer one over another. The one that I hear the most frequently, I think is x lights. It's an open source lights sequencing software package. I have not done this myself, so I do not have a preference. I suggest doing research on the different software packages out there to figure out which one makes sense to you. They all can seem a little obtuse at first like there's a pretty steep learning curve. But in this software you have to go through a process called pixel mapping. That is, you have to tell your computer where each bulb is in your display so that you're able to create the effects that you actually want to show. If you're using props from manufacturers, that process is made simpler because most software packages make it possible for you to indicate which props you're using, and the program automatically associates the shape where the lights are, so that if you want, say your reindeer to go from green to blood red, then you know you can just easily pull up that sequence and associate it with the shape. In this computer program, you do build out sequences. These are the animations and commands that make up your Christmas show, and typically you want to coordinate those with whatever music you're playing. So this all gets associated with a timeline and that gives you precise control over when each element in your sequence initiates. Programming sequences can end up getting very complicated. The hobbyists all have also uploaded sequences that they have design and other people can download those sequences import them into their own control software like x lights and then incorporate it into their own show. So if the whole idea of programming and entire display is daunting to you, like if it seems too technical or two time consuming, it is possible to download previously program sequences and then run them on your system. Once the show is programmed, you then can export it to the show player in the controller or controller is connected to your show, assuming that you have those and which case, at that point, your computer is no longer needed, Like, all all you did was create the sequence. It sent the sequence to the show player that's now stored on the show player. Your computer is done. You don't have to keep it connected to the system, unless, of course, something in the show doesn't work and you have to go back and check the program for errors and figure out what went wrong. Which does happen now? I got to be straight with all of y'all. The programming part of this is a particularly huge task. If you're picking on everything yourself, it can be just as or more time consuming as plugging each individual led into a prop or wiring everything up in the first place and mounting it in your yard or on your house. There are some great tutorials online for the various programs out there. So for example, if you want to know how to get started with X lights, the YouTube channel how to Pixel. The number two how to Pixel has a thorough tutorial on X lights, and by thorough, I mean it's two and a half hours long. Like I said, this stuff gets complicated. Another YouTube channel that I highly recommend is learn Christmas Lighting by above AVL, which has multiple videos dedicated to different components in Christmas lights shows. These folks come from the world of theatrical lighting, so their expertise is considerable in the subject. I do suggest that if you are interested in this, take a look, start reading about it at least or watchings and see if it's something that you know kind of clicks with you. Then is something that you'd be interested in, And try not to go all out right out the gate like build up, you know, gradually, so that you can kind of get comfortable with all the various elements needed in this hobby to make it work, Like you don't need to go all out with fog machines and panning and tilting lights and all that kind of stuff right from the start, Like start slow, get to know the software, get to know the hardware and become familiar with it so that you can build upon that knowledge and create more complicated and impressive light displays moving forward. Also, keep in mind, as I said earlier, this hobby is one that is evolving rapidly. The sophistication of the tools has changed so much over just the last few years. Like it wasn't always possible for you to be able to buy an off the shelf controller, for example, you had to kind of put those things together yourself. You can easily do that. There are multiple companies that offer them, So dip your toe in by watching some videos, reading some blogs, reading some instructions and stuff, find out what kind of fits your your comfort level and go from there. But the cool thing is that ultimately you're going to end up with a really interesting and fun display that can delight people who stop by, and you can really celebrate ingenuity and innovation and technology along with the concept of people coming together and spending time with each other and showing appreciation for one another. I think that's a great thing when technology and sappy sentimentality can come together. Because I'm a soft touch y'all. You should probably know that by now if you've been listening for a while. Anyway. That's a quick overview of do it yourself Christmas lights shows. There is so much more to talk about. I didn't even really scratch the surface, but I just wanted to kind of raise awareness. I think a lot of people they've just seen the stuff that's online and they haven't thought what kind of work goes into actually making that. It's considerable amount of work, but the reward of designing a really nice lights show is also considerable. I mean it may not be monetary, but at least it's a sense of satisfaction of having created something really eye catching and delightful. I hope all of you out there are doing well, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and how the tech are you. It's the holiday season, That's all I'm allowed to sing by law, But in my neck of the woods that means an awful lot of my neighbors have gone over the top with various holiday displays. Now predominantly the holiday celebrated in my neck of the woods is Christmas, And for simplicity's sake, I'll be talking a lot about Christmas lights in this episode. But keep in mind that, you know, obviously people do light shows for all sorts of different holidays, but just for simplicity's sake, I'm going to say Christmas lights because that's what the hobby is largely centered around. And today I really wanted to talk about how people who create those really spectacular light displays, the kind that often are coordinated with music, how they pull that off. And it takes an awful lot of technology. More than that, this technology evolves an incredible pace. The way that people can do this now is far more sophisticated than what was done even just a couple of years ago. So the other thing to keep in mind is if you're listening to this episode after twenty twenty four, there's going to be some dated stuff in here. That's kind of how tech works, and it's really sophisticated, both from a hardware and a software side of things. And yeah, we're going to really dive into this, but on a high level because, as it turns out, if you really really want to get into this stuff, it's going to take some time on your part to really get acquainted with all the nuances. If you want a glimpse at how advanced this tech is, you should look up Christmas lights shows on YouTube. Some of those displays are truly dropping, and of course some people do them for Halloween as well. There's a real bustling community of hobbyists on YouTube with tutorials and product reviews for people in the space. I'll be talking about a few different YouTube channels. For example, Listen to lights or how to Pixel. That's the number two, so how to Pixel. They can give you a lot of information on the technology, the hobby, how to get started and want to watch out for. But before we go any further, let's talk about old school Christmas lights because when I was a kid, the Christmas lights I had they could not do the things that we're seeing these displays do. So in ye olden days of electric Christmas lights, you would buy a string of lights that were wired in series. Now, when we talk about circuits, one way that you can classify simple circuits is by whether they're wired in series or in parallel. Here's a quick refresher course on that in case it's been a while since you've learned about this in science class. So let's start with a power source. The power source provides voltage. This is akin to pressure in the system that's using water or air. That's how much oomph is behind the current. So the higher the voltage, the greater the pressure behind the push of electricity. So a battery typically has you know, fairly low voltage, like a like a little portable battery. It's something you would put in one of your handheld devices. So those are usually around one and a half volts. The outlet in your typical house, at least here in the United States, provides around one hundred and twenty volts of pressure. Now I say in the United States because in other places like say the United Kingdom, it's different. The UK household outlet goes to two hundred and thirty volts. By the way, this is one of the reasons why it's important to use a converter when connecting to outlets in other countries, because you do not want to fry your gear anyway. This pressure is what pushes electricity through a circuit, which you can think of ultimately as a big old loop. That's what a circuit is. It's just a loop. The path goes from one terminal of your power supply and ultimately comes back to connect at a different terminal of that same power supply, and this makes a complete circuit. Now, if it were just a path, that wouldn't be very useful, right, if it was just a loop of wire, I mean it would be useful if you wanted to generate heat, because the circuit would start to get really hot and then eventually melt or catch fire. Then you would be pretty much set because the resistance of the pathway, the electrical resistance, would mean that some of that electrical energy would be transformed into heat, and then if left long enough, it'll heat up enough to really do some damage. Now, instead we connect other stuff to circuits, you know, like light bulbs, for example, and the electricity in the circuit powers the light bulb in your old fashioned incandescent light bulbs. The way this worked is that electricity would flow through a tiny little filament inside the bulb and heat that filament to a point where it would incandesce or light up. This filament would be connect to a pair of electrodes, and then the current could continue on the pathway and go to the next light bulb in the series. We call these elements the load on the circuit, and the load can't exceed what the voltage is capable of doing, or else things won't work out so well. It's kind of like you can push, say a heavy cart, up an incline. You can push it pretty well until it reaches a certain weight, and then your strength just isn't enough to push it up the incline. Same thing with voltage. If you add too much of a load on your circuit and the voltage can't get the job done, then you don't get a really good result. If you've ever used a battery powered device while the batteries were running out of juice, you kind of experienced this. You know, flashlights get dimmer before going out, and electric shavers start to lose their buzz. You get the picture. But as long as the load on a circuit is compatible with the voltage supplied, you're in business. So let's talk about series versus parallel. In a series circuit, each load follows the one before it. It's more like a direct line from the power supply to load one, and then from load one to load two, and so on until you get to the end where the path reconnects with the other tumble all the power supply. That means that power could come through the wire to light bulb number one, then continue to light bulb number two, and so on and so forth until you get to the end of the string, and you might plug a second string into the first, which continues the circuit. This is a pretty straightforward and simple approach, but there is one major problem. If a single light bulb burns out somewhere along that string, it breaks the whole circuit and everything goes dark. It's like if you turn the switch to off instead of on, the filament in that burnt out bulb breaks apart. Essentially, it burns through and that means the electricity no longer has a path it can follow. It's what we would call an open circuit. You have to find the burnt out bulb and replace it in order to repair the circuit and get things working again. It could be a real hassle. Same thing could come true if a light bulb becomes loose in its socket and it doesn't have a good connection. Same issue. At least in that case, you're not having to replace the bulb. You just have to figure out which one's lucy goosey in its socket. This is also why the Netflix series Stranger Things presented a real challenge to electricians like John Hilton, who worked on the series. Hilton appeared on an episode of Tech Stuff in the Past It's a great episode and we talked about this challenge. So Hilton and Jess Royal from the series talked about what it was like working on there from behind the scenes, and Hilton explained that the story required fine tune manipulation of a string of Christmas lights. So a character caught in the upside down would use Christmas lights to communicate with his mother by lighting up very specific bulbs on a string. But, as Hilton explained, that's kind of the opposite of how these old Christmas lights worked. You know, you can't just turn off or on a single bulb. They're either all on or they're all off. So to achieve the effect in the series, Hilton had to actually individually wire each bulb in a string to an electric board so they look like they were wired together, but they weren't. They were each wired separately, and from that electric board he could manipulate the bulbs individually by turning off or on the power to that specific bulb. However, he also had to make it look like it was a normal string of nineteen eighties era Christmas lights, which meant he had to find ways to hide all those individual wires running from each bulb to his control board, which is not an easy task, especially even if you're sitting there and only wiring up the lights that are going to be used to communicate. Like you figure out, oh they never use the letter K or Q or whatever, it's still a whole bunch of wires to deal with. Now, I did mention that you could also wire circuits in parallel. Now, I imagine in this case that rather than having each bulb connected in a straight line on that circuit. You have a pair of wires connected to each bulb that then you know, branches off from the main circuit path. So instead of a string which is just one bulb after the other, it's more like a string in which there's kind of a turnoff for bulb number one, but if you just keep going down the string, you'll come to the turnoff for bulb number two and so on. These bulbs are in a way, they're isolated from one another. And a big benefit to this approach is that if a single bulb burns out, the path is unbroken for the rest of the string, so your entire string doesn't go dark. You would still have one dark bulb, but you would have to replace that, but everything else would still be lit up. Now, some Christmas lights are wired in what's called series parallel, all right, So this means you have multiple strings of lights wired in series, but collectively, each individual string of lights are in parallel with one another. So let's say there's like four parallel strings of lights and one of those strings goes out, the other three would remain lit up, so you would have a section go dark, but the rest of your lights would still be lit up and that's series parallel. It's part and part right within a series string. Any light going out makes the rest of that string go out, but the rest of the parallel strings remain lit up. You know. That's how it used to be, right that if a light goes out, then you're kind of up the creek. More recently, Christmas lights have included an element called a shunt, which helps. So this is something that creates a path of lower resistance in an electric circuit, and electricity will follow the path of least resistance. Electricity is a lot like me. If there's a task that requires effort, I'm likely to seek out the way in which I can expend the least amount of energy to complete that task, even if that means I don't do as good a job in the process. If my bosses are listening, I was only kidding. So the shunts in Christmas lights are wires connected to the electrodes. So remember I mentioned that a filament connects two electrodes together, and then electricity, you know, flows through the filament and heats it up and incandesces and that's where you get your light and your old incandescent lights. Eventually, the filament will burn out. It just it burns through and breaks, and then you don't have a path anymore. Well, the shunt acts as a secondary connection between those two electrons, but it has a higher resistance than the filament. So normally electricity will flow through the filament because again it follows the path of least resistance. But if the filament breaks, now it'll flow through the shunt because even though it had a higher electrical resistance, it still represents a viable path. And if there is a viable path, electricity will take it. And so the show goes on. Since I'm talking about shunts, I should also take a moment to talk about fuses. So a fuse is a safety measure. The fuse is there to make sure that if something really unexpected happens, like let's say there's a surge in electricity, the voltage suddenly changes very dramatically, you don't want that to cause more problems. You don't want that to create like a fire hazard, for example. So the fuse allows electricity to flow through under normal conditions, but if it's under a more extreme circumstance, the fuze will break, kind of like the filament does once it burns out. But the fuse is designed to break on purpose once voltage exceeds a certain level, so it's like a limit on how much it can allow through, and if the incoming voltage exceeds that, the fuse trips, so you don't end up with a real catastrophe on your hands. It's just an open circuit so the electricity doesn't flow through. In Christmas lights, you can typically find fuses near the plug where it plugs into either the wall or another string of Christmas lights. In some of these lights, you can actually replace the fuse if it does burn out. I have never done this personally, so I have no clue as to how challenging or easy it is to do this, though these days with my eyesight, I imagine it'd be devilishly tricky if I don't have my peepers on. One other thing that I should mention is the transition from incandescent bulbs to LED bulbs. So incandescent bulbs that was what we had when I was a kid, those big Christmas lights. We even had bubblers disslights that would include liquid in a little vial that would bubble as the light would heat the liquid up. It was really neat or I thought it was really neat. But in stranger things. You know, the crew were working with these old incandescent bulbs because again that's what we had in the nineteen eighties. But these days Christmas lights tend to be LEDs, light emitting diodes. Now that's great for lots of different reasons. One is that LEDs need way less energy to generate light, something like seventy percent less than incandescent strings, which is both good for the environment. It's also good for your wallet because you won't be footing a massive electricity bill just to keep your house all holly jolly. Also, LED bulbs last a whole lot longer than incandescent bulbs do. And you can even create strings of LED lights in which each LED can be turned on or off individually. That's advanced level stuff that we're going to talk about. Now. Your typical LED string of lights you can't do that. They're not designed to do that. They just plug into your wall, they all come on. They might have a simple controller on them that allows them to do things like dim and brighten or twinkle or flash those kinds of things. That's basic level stuff. Serious hobbyists get into the individually controllable LED bulbs, where each LED bulb has its own microchip, which in turn has to be wired to a controller. When we talk about addresses and stuff, we'll get more into that, because that's kind of like the advanced level thing. On a side note, those last types of LEDs aren't something you're going to find in your typical big box stores. Those Christmas lights tend to be far simpler in design. Those are like the off the shelf things that you'll find in your basic retail store. Some retail stores are selling kits for holiday light shows, but they tend to be proprietary, and at least in the hobbyist field, the serious hobbyists tend to look down on those kits. One because they don't have as much flexibility. You can't incorporate things that are outside those proprietary kits to work with them. Another is that there's at least an opinion, a fairly prevalent opinion, and the hobbyists that I listened to as I was listening to podcasts and watching videos and stuff, who feel that the quality of those products is lower than what you'll get if you're doing things yourself, and that a lot of those things will break down after a season or two and that it just gets really expensive and wasteful. So your mileage may vary, but that's what I heard. So most of the hobby blogs and videos that I encountered suggested that you should order straight from where the lights are manufactured, which is China. They also warned that this also comes with its own risks. If something doesn't work correctly, it may be difficult or even impossible to return the lights to get working ones, so you have to be really careful to make sure that you're ordering from a reputable seller. But yeah, the LEDs that serious hobbyists use typically are meant for stuff like digital disp lays and signage where you need to be able to control individual lights in order to spell things out right like roadwork ahead or whatever it may be, except you're using it to make frosty, you know, melt or something. I don't know what you do for your Christmas lights displays. So these have just been repurposed to be really a holly jolly kind of approach. And now we're going to take a quick break. When we come back, I'm going to talk about some more details of the early days of Christmas lights show as a hobby, so we're back now. In the early days, light show hobbyists ran into problems similar to those of the Stranger Things Crew. The old style Christmas lights could only be controlled by the string rather by the individual bulb, So you could turn a string of lights off or on, and that was relatively simple on a high It just meant that you had to control the electricity that was going to that particular string. You know, you turned the electricity off, the lights go off, you turn it on, the lights come on. That's it. The old lights had no ability to change color either. If you wanted to create an effect of a color change, then it meant that you actually had to use multiple strings of lights. Like let's say you wanted to outline a window frame outside your house in lights and create an effect that those lights are changing from red to green. Well, you would actually have to use strings of red lights to outline the frame and then strings of green lights to outline the frame, and then you would just have to alternate which string was getting power at what time in order to get that effect of red changing to green and green changing to red. Modern led lights often have RGB red green and blue elements inside each bulb, meaning that you control the concentration of what kind of light is allowed to be emitted, so you can actually change the color within a single string of lights. Now you don't have to double up or triple up whatever it may be, which does simplify things at least from a wiring perspective, not necessarily from the programming perspective. As for controlling which string received power at any given time, well, you would need to run your lights to a controller box. So essentially this box acts as a switch, and in the old days it is simply just switched power going from one outlet connected to one set of lights or a different outlet. The strings of lights would attach to the controller box. But the controller is just a tool. It doesn't know when it's supposed to switch stuff on or off on its own. It has to be programmed. And with a program, the controller follows a preset series of instructions a sequence in order to achieve whatever the effect was that was desired. Again, those early variations essentially just being which strings of lights were on or off at any given moment. Now, as we'll see, if you really want to go all out for the holidays, you could get wicked complicated with your setup, but let's start with the simple stuff. So let's say you've got your strings of lights hung with care on your home. You know, the trees, the family dog, whatever it might be, And now you want to create a sequence for these lights to follow. They shouldn't just twinkle or stay on. They should go on and off according to your whimsical nature, perhaps creating animated effects or spelling stuff out. Even it takes an awful lot of technology and effort to enable whimsy. As it turns out, we aren't all like Willy Waka, where things just magically happen. So the world of hobbyists Christmas lights shows ends up borrowing a lot of technology and technique from the world of stage lighting. Now, if you've ever been to a big professional theatrical production like a Broadway show or an arena concert, you've likely seen some pretty amazing lighting effects, like entire banks of lights might sweep around and focus on a specific spot, or create interesting patterns on the background, or all sorts of other effects. To achieve that, and not to have five hundred stage hands manually controlling every light with precision, you need some special circuit boards. Now I mentioned a controller earlier. These are large logic boards that the direct power or commands to specific elements according to a pre program set of instructions. Now, before we get into those more, let's talk about LEDs. Let's say that you've gone all out. You've decided to get the LEDs that you're able to control one bulb at a time. Each of these bulbs can create any number of colors using a variation of the red, green, and blue elements that are inside each bulb. Essentially, these bulbs are pixels, just like you would have on a television or other display. Each light bulb represents one point of light, and by controlling them collectively, you can create different shapes, including words. The pixel lights typically will be able again to create pretty much any color you want. Some Christmas lights sequencer programs refer to these pixels as nodes. Technically, a node is any singular controllable element in a show. So let's say that you have a string of lights that's an old style string right the series lights where you can't control individual light bulbs, that string would be a node. But if you do have bulbs that can be controlled individually, each bulb would be a node, So it all depends on what are you controlling. Whether it's a string or a single light bulb, each one would be a single node. These lights have a different kind of plug, the fancy led ones, they have a different kind of plug than the ones you would find on your regular old Christmas light strings. You wouldn't plug them into the wall. And it makes sense because these lights have to be able to accept digital commands. So you know, you have your wires that are in charge of carrying the electricity to the bulbs, but you also need to be able to control data. So it's a three pin plug and it's designed to plug into a controller. The controllers themselves come in several varieties. You can purchase components separately. You can actually, you know, buy a circuit board controller unit and you know, an old like power box, waterproof power box and mount your circuit board inside the power box along with a power supply and some other elements. It's a lot like building a PC from basic components if you have ever done that, where you order all the different elements from different companies whatever, assuming that you've made sure that they're all going to be compatible, and then you mount them in the case and then you turn it on and hope that it works. Similar thing there. However, nowadays quite a few companies are offering fully built out controller systems, like ready to play controller systems, so that you don't have to do any of that stuff yourself. Now, you're likely going to be paying more for a ready to run style controller, but not that much more. The gap between doing it yourself and the stuff that's already been assembled, it's not huge, and if you value your time a lot, then you may say, hey, it makes way more sense for me to buy this ready made solution as opposed to trying to do it myself. If, however, you get lots of joy and satisfaction out of doing it yourself, that's a completely legitimate reason to do it. You're just not going to save that much money. You will save a little now. One thing the controller is going to need is obviously power, so figuring out how to run a power supply to a controller is an important step. It's also important that that power supply is weather proofed, so in the old days, like I said, you might mount a power supply like the kind you would use with a PC inside the power box along with the controller's circuit board and just run power from the box to the circuit board, then cables connecting to the power source that would then run to say, an outlet in your home, or you might buy a weather proofed power source that can sit on the ground and then run a cable from that to your controller. But yeah, that power ends up going to the controller, which then can send power out to the various elements connected to your show. But yeah, figuring that out is really important. Really complex displays may actually use multiple controllers. Some may use several big controllers or lots of small ones, or a combination of the two. That obviously necessitates multiple power solutions to make everything work and not become like a tripping hazard for everyone living in the home. That itself can be a huge challenge. Typically, you also have to connect another device like a computer to the controller. In the old days, you had to have in the old days being like three years ago, you had to have your computer connected to the controller so that you could send the sequence the show to the controller so that it then could send the commands out to all the different elements. Because again, the controller doesn't have any real intelligence itself. It just knows where to send instructions at what time to what element, but it has to get those instructions from somewhere. Typically that was a computer. Now these days you can get a device that often is referenced as a show player. In a way, it's kind of like a dry that stores show instructions and it will take on the role of the computer. Like you have to still program the show on your computer, but you then send that program to the show player, which stores the program, and then when it's the right time to initiate, it will send all the commands to the controller, which then sends those signals to the various elements in your Christmas show. If your display has elements that are really far away from the controller, and by far i'm talking like maybe more than twenty five feet, then you'll also probably have to use receivers. I mean, you could use different controllers for different elements so that you know no element is more than twenty five feet away from its controller, But that gets really complicated. Receivers receive a signal from the controller and then send it further along the chain, which allows you to have certain show elements that would be further away from the controller. So you have a really big yard, for example, and you want to run elements way out to trees or in the front, as well as all the stuff that's in your you know, on your house itself. That might be something that you would have to look into. Another component you'll probably need is a radio transmitter in the FM band of frequencies. Now, this is so that the people driving up to watch your display can tune into a particular radio station to hear the accompanying music. Some displays also make use of outdoor speaker systems that will play music, you know, not as a super high volume at least if you have any consideration for your neighbors, but within the actual environment, so people walking up could hear the music too. However, if you're going to use a radio transmitter, there are certain rules you have to follow. So countries have very strict laws regarding radio frequency bands and who can use them and what they can be used for. And in order to have permission to broadcast on certain bands like the FM radio frequency band, typically you need to secure a license, which is incredibly expensive. However, if your transmission is under a certain power, you're okay. So here in the United States, the rule is if you're staying under point zero one microwatts of power at three meters, you're good to go, and you can choose the frequency band you want to broadcast on. You would need to choose something other than a radio station currently in use in your area or else your broadcast is going to be completely overpowered, and then you need to alert folks that they should tune their car radios to that specific channel. The transmitter's job is to transmit the signal sent to it over the radio, and the signal ideally is some Christmas music that you have coordinated with the program light display during the actual sequencing or programming phase, so it's another component. Also, the music obviously ends up being something that gets sent to the show player as well. It's all part of the program. Really, you could think of it as almost like a video where you've got the audio and the video stuff all synced up. It's similar to that. One other element you'll need, and you'll need several of these depending on what you want to do, is some sort of mounting material for the lights. So this is essentially a frame through which you plug the light bulbs in so that each pixel is held in the right position relative to its neighbors. Now that probably sounds obvious. If you're controlling bulbs pixel by pixel, The only way it works is if all the pixels maintain their relative position to one another. So you might use strips of plastic with holes cut through to push the bulbs into. You could create shapes that you wanted to in order, like do your own so that you get the effects to have stuff light up, but those are really hard, Like I mean, if you wanted to make a snowman or a reindeer or crampus or whatever, doing it yourself is extremely challenging. These are often referred to as props, and the nice thing is you can buy props like the hobby. There's tons of props that are available in different shapes. So if you want candy canes, no problem. You can get candy cane shapes and these props frequently you can actually get the digital equivalent of the prop to be plugged into your sequencing software so that your computer automatically recognizes these prop shapes and how they are lined up. So the props tend to come with instructions on how you are to install those pixels, how you plug the digital pixels in where you start, where you end what pattern you want to follow, and then that gets sent to the computer software. And the computer software already knows where each of those pixels are in relation to each other, so that way, when you run a program through it, it displays properly on the prop. Because that you have to tell the pixels where they live, you have to create addresses. So yeah, for programs to even work, lights have to have an address. Each light has its own address. This as much like your computer or your smartphone has an IP address on the Internet. Similar thing. For the controller to know which bulbs to turn on and off, those bulbs have to have an address. Otherwise you would just have random patterns being shown, and if your bulbs weren't in the right position, it would just look like a mess. So the standard that the lighting industry here in the United States uses is called DMX or sometimes DMX five twelve. The lighting industry in stage and concert productions developed the standard over a number of years in order to streamline control processes because before that standard, lighting technicians had to deal with lots of different proprietary methods to control different elements on the lighting board. That was really complicated and it meant it was a real pain in the butt to set up and break down. It was a nightmare from a wiring perspective. DMX five twelve simplified matters. So essentially, every device, every node will if you will, gets a DMX address. Now, some devices actually receive more than one address. For example, let's say you've got a light mounted in a system and the light has the ability to dim, well, the dimmer is on an address. If the mounted system can tilt, well, you've got tilt controls. That requires another address, and so on. So depending on how much an element can do, if it can pan left and right, well, then you need addresses for that. It's not necessarily a one to one system. In other words, it all depends on the number of effects the device is capable of producing. Each effect needs to have its own address so the controller can send the correct signal to that element at the right time. Now I could do an entire episode on DMX and the technologies associated with it and not even touch on the fact that there's also the music artist DMX, but that's getting away from our conversation about Christmas light shows. What you need to know is that DMX five twelve makes it possible to quantify and control each pixel in a display, and since it's a standard, you don't have to worry about proprietary issues, assuming you haven't bought into some proprietary string of lights controller system. Again, that's why Obvious often will buy direct from China to get these elements that can work with the open standards of DMX five twelve as opposed to some proprietary approach where it only works with that one company's equipment, because you want to be able to incorporate whatever elements you like and not be limited to what some company has created. Now let's talk about software. There are a few different software packages out there that let you program at Christmas lights show. People have their favorites. They all are trying to do the same thing, but the user interface is quite different from software to software. Some people prefer one over another. The one that I hear the most frequently, I think is x lights. It's an open source lights sequencing software package. I have not done this myself, so I do not have a preference. I suggest doing research on the different software packages out there to figure out which one makes sense to you. They all can seem a little obtuse at first like there's a pretty steep learning curve. But in this software you have to go through a process called pixel mapping. That is, you have to tell your computer where each bulb is in your display so that you're able to create the effects that you actually want to show. If you're using props from manufacturers, that process is made simpler because most software packages make it possible for you to indicate which props you're using, and the program automatically associates the shape where the lights are, so that if you want, say your reindeer to go from green to blood red, then you know you can just easily pull up that sequence and associate it with the shape. In this computer program, you do build out sequences. These are the animations and commands that make up your Christmas show, and typically you want to coordinate those with whatever music you're playing. So this all gets associated with a timeline and that gives you precise control over when each element in your sequence initiates. Programming sequences can end up getting very complicated. The hobbyists all have also uploaded sequences that they have design and other people can download those sequences import them into their own control software like x lights and then incorporate it into their own show. So if the whole idea of programming and entire display is daunting to you, like if it seems too technical or two time consuming, it is possible to download previously program sequences and then run them on your system. Once the show is programmed, you then can export it to the show player in the controller or controller is connected to your show, assuming that you have those and which case, at that point, your computer is no longer needed, Like, all all you did was create the sequence. It sent the sequence to the show player that's now stored on the show player. Your computer is done. You don't have to keep it connected to the system, unless, of course, something in the show doesn't work and you have to go back and check the program for errors and figure out what went wrong. Which does happen now? I got to be straight with all of y'all. The programming part of this is a particularly huge task. If you're picking on everything yourself, it can be just as or more time consuming as plugging each individual led into a prop or wiring everything up in the first place and mounting it in your yard or on your house. There are some great tutorials online for the various programs out there. So for example, if you want to know how to get started with X lights, the YouTube channel how to Pixel. The number two how to Pixel has a thorough tutorial on X lights, and by thorough, I mean it's two and a half hours long. Like I said, this stuff gets complicated. Another YouTube channel that I highly recommend is learn Christmas Lighting by above AVL, which has multiple videos dedicated to different components in Christmas lights shows. These folks come from the world of theatrical lighting, so their expertise is considerable in the subject. I do suggest that if you are interested in this, take a look, start reading about it at least or watchings and see if it's something that you know kind of clicks with you. Then is something that you'd be interested in, And try not to go all out right out the gate like build up, you know, gradually, so that you can kind of get comfortable with all the various elements needed in this hobby to make it work, Like you don't need to go all out with fog machines and panning and tilting lights and all that kind of stuff right from the start, Like start slow, get to know the software, get to know the hardware and become familiar with it so that you can build upon that knowledge and create more complicated and impressive light displays moving forward. Also, keep in mind, as I said earlier, this hobby is one that is evolving rapidly. The sophistication of the tools has changed so much over just the last few years. Like it wasn't always possible for you to be able to buy an off the shelf controller, for example, you had to kind of put those things together yourself. You can easily do that. There are multiple companies that offer them, So dip your toe in by watching some videos, reading some blogs, reading some instructions and stuff, find out what kind of fits your your comfort level and go from there. But the cool thing is that ultimately you're going to end up with a really interesting and fun display that can delight people who stop by, and you can really celebrate ingenuity and innovation and technology along with the concept of people coming together and spending time with each other and showing appreciation for one another. I think that's a great thing when technology and sappy sentimentality can come together. Because I'm a soft touch y'all. You should probably know that by now if you've been listening for a while. Anyway. That's a quick overview of do it yourself Christmas lights shows. There is so much more to talk about. I didn't even really scratch the surface, but I just wanted to kind of raise awareness. I think a lot of people they've just seen the stuff that's online and they haven't thought what kind of work goes into actually making that. It's considerable amount of work, but the reward of designing a really nice lights show is also considerable. I mean it may not be monetary, but at least it's a sense of satisfaction of having created something really eye catching and delightful. I hope all of you out there are doing well, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.