Happy 2023! We took our show from 2019 and updated it to take advantage of the Garage Door Pixel Screen and some new pixels in the front pine trees. We also made several behind-the-scenes changes as well that hopefully nobody will notice. The Interactive Light Display is also back for another year where people can interact with our lights using several different controllers. It is also now 500 pixels larger this year! See below for more details on each new thing in this year’s display.
2023 Show Video
New Stuff for 2023
Pixels in the Pine Trees!
We have finally replaced the old-school lights in the two dwarf pine trees with bullet LED pixels! Each tree has 150 bulbs that can now be individually controlled and made any color. This gives us a lot more flexibility with how we use those trees in the show and helps add depth to many of the whole house effects we use.
Hard-wiring the Garage Door LED Screen
In an effort to minimize network latency, the garage door pixel screen no longer runs off a wireless ESPixelStick Pixel Controller but is instead controlled by the hard-wired Sandevices E682 Pixel Controller that already exists in the garage for controlling the lights on the front of the garage and on the mailbox-side of the driveway. This required re-imagining the wire harness setup that gets power/control to the lights while still allowing the garage door to operate normally. Check out Garage Door Pixel Screen for more info about that element.
A New Front Porch Controller
We also replaced the ESPixelStick Pixel Controller that was mounted under the eaves of the front porch with a new Dig-Quad Pixel Controller 4-universe wired controller. The goal here was to reduce the chance for networking issues by going wired instead of wireless, to improve upon a very challenging power injection situation for the left side of the house, and to allow for running the new pine tree pixels from the same controller.
We achieved most of those stated goals, but one of the pine trees was inexplicably suffering from flickering issues, despite receiving more than adequate power. After hours of troubleshooting and figurative (and occasional literal) banging our heads against the wall, we finally gave in and are running one of the two pine trees off of the old ESPixelStick Pixel Controller tucked underneath the front window. This is hopefully just a short term solution until we can figure out why the intended setup isn’t working as expected. UPDATE: We’ve decided to just run both pine trees off of an ESPixelStick. This saves on a lot of wiring to/from the porch ceiling and is now working perfectly.
Replacing a Whole Universe with New Pixels
We bought most of the pixels on the house back in 2016 and their age is starting to show. Each year, we replace pixels that have gone bad and our supply of extra pixels to use as replacements has run out. Unfortunately, newer pixels are not necessarily compatible with older pixels and thus we can’t just buy new pixels and stick them in the middle of a section of old pixels and have everything work.
Our solution was to replace an entire universe (number 5, the one at the highest point on the house) with new pixels and now we have a collection of about 100 old pixels we can use as replacements around all the other universes on the house. This should keep us going for years until we eventually will have to replace all the pixels when their failure rate gets higher than we are willing to manage. We have noticed that the pixels have gotten more power hungry as they have aged and we’ve had to add extra power injection points periodically to compensate.
Controlling the new pixels required updating the Sandevices E682 Pixel Controller software, which led to about 8 hours of troubleshooting and incredible amounts of frustration. To summarize very briefly the journey we went through, the software update made a thing configurable that wasn’t previously configurable and the default value changed to a value far lower than it should have been. This caused any universe with a cable length between the controller and first pixel of larger than about 10 feet to stop working. After many hours of climbing around on the roof with a confused/dumbfounded look on his face, Phil finally figured out what was going on and fixed the rogue controller setting. Instantly, all the universes started working perfectly again!
A New Network Router
After initial testing still showed some network lag in the show, we decided it was time to swap out the router for an extra one we had laying around. The original router has lived in the attic for 7+ years and experienced absurd temperature swings. No consumer electronic can standup to that abuse forever and hopefully this simple swap will make everything run more smoothly and minimize any network issues.
Bigger Interactive Display
The Interactive Light Display is back for its third year with the guitar, drum, and steering wheel controllers and a matrix of lights. As always, we welcome feedback on it. Help us make it more fun and engaging by telling us what works, what doesn’t, and what new things you would like to see.
It has grown in size this season with an extra 500 pixels to increase the width from 20 pixels wide to 30 pixels wide for a grand total of 1500 pixels. We continue to make various software improvements as well to make
Improved Traffic Sign Frames
The Colorado wind has defeated us one too many times with our PVC frames for the signs. We’ve finally said enough is enough and replaced them with metal conduit instead. The cost is actually not much more than using PVC and the frames can be much thinner and look a lot better. We hope these will stand the test of time no matter what Colorado Decembers throw at us!
Music
This year’s show is 8 minutes and 45 seconds long and runs every 10 minutes. When the show is not running, we have some interlude lighting, a brief voice over from Philip, some background music, and a countdown timer running on the pixel screen.
For the show, we play portions of the following songs/quotes:
- Flight of the Snow Angels | Wizards of Winter
- Carol of the Bells [Heavy Metal Version Cover] | Orion’s Reign
- Celtic Carol | Lindsey Stirling
- What Is Christmas? | Trans-Siberian Orchestra
- Quote from The Grinch
- Joy to the World [Symphonic Heavy Metal Version] | Orion’s Reign & Minniva
- (Outro) Let It Go [Epic Metal Cover] | Connor Engstrom and Anthony Nuccio
- (Interlude) The First Noel | Gary Hoey
Broomfield Lights 