A lot of changes were brought in with the year 2021. The biggest of the change I was not expecting when the calendar rolled over and that was moving to a new house. All the changes have been good, have kept me busy and most importantly have been great for my family. I had all kinds of great ideas I was going to add to my house for light displays but instead, I have a new place and I was having a difficult time envisioning how I wanted to light the place up. As a consequence, it is not as many lights as I was hoping but I am happy with my first year effort on this place. I have built a far better foundation for the control computer and although the face of this house isn’t as interesting as the last one, its physical arrangement does allow for me to do some better things in the future.
I sequenced two new light shows this year, the first, Retromance by Perifractic aka CJ Simpson and the second, Light of Christmas by Owl City. I “retooled” the three other songs from last year but are, in my opinion, not as good as they were on my previous home due to fewer lights. Next year, I’ll give them all a good polish but until then. Have a look at the musical light dancing below.
The lights are sequenced to music using Falcon Player running on a BeagleBone Black with the Kulp Lights F8-B Cape and a Pixel2AC board. The sequence was programmed using xLights on openSUSE Tumbleweed.
Retromance by Perifractic aka CJ Simpson
Retromance, originally created at the end of 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwDk3… and in 2021 presented again but with A.I. dream of Christmas nostalgia retro, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B72wQ… . This is another song by Perifractic I really enjoyed. It was composed with help of a computer simulating the SID sound chip from the greatest 8-bit computer of the 80s, the Commodore 64. Although it may not translate well in the video itself, but the blue colors of the Commodore 64 BASIC screen is is throughout the light dance, mostly for my own personal gratification.
Light of Christmas by Owl City / TobyMac
This is, perhaps the song I wanted to do most when I first became aware of this open source festive light solution but didn’t feel like I had the editing “chops” to do it well. I am quite happy with it but do wish I had more lights to make it more interesting to watch.
Playlist of all Light Sequences
This includes my 2019, 2020 and 2021 light shows.
Final Thoughts
The lights on the house itself are there to stay indefinitely and this sort of lighting will spread to the other buildings as well. I happen to like this method of night time lighting more than the typical motion sensor light. I do think I need to step up my lighting game for next Christmas, but in the mean time, my “festive” lights will continue to bring me happiness by shining through the darkness and reflecting the seasons. Now, to put together a “Zero to Sixty” or maybe just “Zero to thirty-five” guide on getting this set up the easy way.
References
Music: Retromance by CJ Simpson aka Perifractic https://album.link/i/1547279292
Kulp Lights – https://kulplights.com/
Pixel 2 AC – https://www.pixel2things.com/
xLights – http://xlights.org/
openSUSE Linux – https://opensuse.org
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