My First Steps

"A journey with thousands of LEDs begins with a single step" or some such.

I started really honestly thinking about doing one of the sound-synced displays when I saw two in 2020, one of which was primarily strung together (heh) by a high school kid. I figured if he could do it and make it look decent, so could I.

The other of the two displays I saw that night actually had a website: http://christmasoutloud.com/. My main question was "how", and while there was not a lot of information to answer this, it gave me enough to point me in the right direction.

One of the specific technologies identified in this (admittedly very old) website was Light-O-Rama, a tech which I soon found was geared more towards the works-out-of-the-box experience. Of course, I can never have anything be that easy for me, so I used that as a starting point, doing searches for Light-O-Rama alternates. Of course, there are plenty of alternates, both on the hardware and software side of things.

Since I have no interest in building out the same display more than once to determine what is the best, I've opted to just pick technologies which seem to have the most mentions, support, resources, etc. I know kinda what I'm looking for in terms of the physical, viewable display, so I only have to figure out the exact types of lights, how to power them, how to control them, and how to program them. Daunting decisions, since there is usually no right answer, just optimizations for various things which I don't know yet!

Since I have the end result pretty well in mind, I figured I'd start with the actual show sequencing itself. I have a bunch of reasons for doing this, but a good portion of the decision making comes down to price. This is an expensive hobby (I'm a LEGO collector; I know expensive) and I'd like to be able to spread the financial impact out a little.

Thus I'm starting with what I want the display to look like. This will also help me determine how much I can trim it and still have it look good (in software terms, how can I get it to an MVP or a v1). Doing so will allow me to identify components which make sense to incrementally add on (e.g. pixels, power, props, etc) as opposed to purchasing larger with expansion in mind (e.g. controllers).

Enter the sequencer. There are quite a few out there, but after ~1 week of Googling, I believe the biggest three are Light-O-Rama's Showtime Suite, Vixen, and xLights. Of course, that's cheating since Showtime Suite pretty well locks you into LOR and I'm not going that route, so I had to choose between Vixen and xLights, both of which are free.

I've chosen xLights, mainly because it seems to have better support and a richer feature set, admittedly at a potential cost of ease of use. A couple things I really like about it (not sure how useful they are, but we'll see) are the animation mode where I don't have to sync it to music, and the 3D preview for my house which, given the way I'm imagining my layout, will make things easier to visualize. Hopefully.

Note that I have never used either Vixen or Showtime Suite, and I don't intend to unless I become completely frustrated with xLights, so any comparisons have a strong potential to be invalid due to ignorance. That's what you get when you read a post by someone who's not a professional Christmas light programmer review person.

Any rate, that's my next step: get xLights, set up the display in my mind, add a sequence to it, then see what phases make sense. After that, I can find out what I need to purchase and start making orders. Fortunately, it's Dec. 28, so I have roughly 11 months to get this all sorted!