My Christmas lights are up and I have to say I am pretty happy with them. You can check out a video of them below. If you are interested in how they were put together then read on.
I went over how the hardware was put together in a previous post.
Since putting together the hardware, I had to overcome the software challenges. I had already selected the open source Pixel Controller project to drive the lights, but I needed to give the show a more Christmassy feel.
So I put together an image of Santa and a Christmas tree and loaded them into PixelController and applied some interesting effects as you can see in the video above.
I also wrote a couple of processing scripts to create the rotating star and the snow effect.
Then I had the challenge of coordinating and scheduling the whole show. I ended up writing oscScheduler, a nodejs module that let me set up a repeating show scheduled to run every night for the Christmas season.
Of course I am already thinking about next year's display.