Halloween 2006 Photos & Videos Of Our Animated Lights Dancing to Music

By: Jeff Ostroff

October 24, 2006

Click on any of the photos below for a higher resolution view

The show transmits on FM stations to car radios too!
In the photo below, look to the left of the lighting controller box on the floor. You'll see my low power Ramsey FM30b FM Stereo Transmitter box, which transmits the audio in high quality stereo from my light show MP3 controller card up to a few hundred feet away.  I just dial up any FM station frequency I want to transmit on via the LCD display, and it transmits in full stereo. People who drive by our house can tune their car radios to an unused FM station, in our case, 100.9 MHz, and hear the music in perfect CD stereo sound while they watch our lights dance perfectly to the music from the comfort of their car.  This way later at night I don't need to pump out loud audio through yard speakers and disturb my neighbors.

How we make the lights synchronize to the music
To the right below is a screen shot of the software I use to create the animation of lights synchronized to the music. First I import an MP3 version of the song off my CD into the software. Using the software, I select time intervals that divide up the song into one tenth of a second intervals as shown in this screen shot below, and it forms cells similar to Microsoft Excel spreadsheets. Then I painstakingly throughout the song tell the lights to turn on or off, or to fade or twinkle, by appropriately shading in or ramping up the cells with color, starting and stopping the song as I go along to watch it play out.  In the example below, you can see that in this passage shown for "Monster Mash", I started off with a rotation of my pumpkins arranged in a circle, slowly ramping up in brightness from the off position.  Then the stair step ramps you see are rapid chasing of the pumpkins in a circle.  The bottom of the software screen shot also shows that I am constantly ramping up and fading down the rope lights to the beat of the Monster Mash drum line.  It takes about 5 hours total to synchronize a 3 minute song into 16 channels of light if you want to do it right, and hit every nuance.  Essentially you are acting as a conductor, creating a 16 track symphony of lights, one tenth of a second at a time. To save time, you cut and paste repeating sections of the song.

Simulating The lights to the music
It would be pretty hard to shade in all these cells, and try to figure out what your lights are going to look like without some type of simulation.  Some people obsess over making elaborate lighting boards in their garage so they can see it in action as they sequence.  That's ok, but requires increased costs as you to wire up many individual C9 lights with light string simulating load resistors and electrical plugs, and C9 lights don't act like all other lights either. I prefer to just simulate it on the screen and use my spare time on the sequences. Just like airline pilots use flight simulators to see what their landings will look like, I use an Animation Simulator window to recreate my lighting setup exactly as it will appear from a birds eye view on my front lawn.  Below is my 16 channel lighting arrangement.  You can draw any type of display and make any channel into any color you want.  With only 16 channels, I just left them all orange.

In my animation window at left, you can see 12 pumpkins arranged in a circle, and a long set of rope lights in an L-shaped border that runs down my driveway and across the front curb in front of my house.  The 2 squares above the circle of pumpkins represent 2 large pumpkins I have, along with some white LED mini trees that I built for Christmas, and any background fill flood lights I plan to use in the final outdoor yard Halloween lighting setup.  But my awesome mini LED trees are so white that I thought they would be appropriate for Halloween lighting as well, to simulate lightening as it shines through the fog in my graveyard that I will build on my front lawn as part of the holiday decorations.

As the song progresses, I can see the simulator window shows my lights twinkle, turn off, turn on, or fade, perfectly to the music.  Once I know this works, I then save my animation files and MP3 audio files of the song to an SD card, and slide the SD card into my controller, where it runs in standalone mode to run the lights.  As soon as it powers up, the programs are read out of the SD drive and the musical lighting animations begin immediately.  They play in a loop as long as the controller is powered up.  The MP3 controller does not yet have the ability to run a schedule, but most likely will be able to with LOR's expected firmware release in late 2006.

This is our yard setup, note how it mimics the animation software simulation screen above. While creating sequences on our PC, we can simulate how it looks in the yard.

This is the 16 channel lighting controller that we use to run all the lights. You can see the MP3 card inside the controller with the audio jack feeding audio to our radio transmitter.

Look closely on the MP3 circuit board, you can see the 256 MB SD card that stores the entire set of 13 sequenced songs. Each sequence song is like a player piano roll, and it tells each light when to turn on or off, or fade or twinkle, according to the way I told it to do so inside the animation software.