Technical Details

For those wondering how it’s done here’s some technical details about the light show.

What’s Your Electric Bill?!

We never run our lights at more than 30% brightness – which means significant savings on energy – and the fact that unlike a traditional Light Display, our lights are not on all the time – we see our electricity go up by a few dollars for the months and that’s it!

2024 Nerd Stats

Number of Pixels: 6,200 – all 5V minus our Gutter/Peak lights.

Amount of Controllers: 2x Falcon F16v3 w/ 3x Smart Receivers, 2x Dumb Receivers

Mega Tree stats:

-Roughly 12-13ft Tall

-16 Pixel Strips – 50 each – for a total of 600 pixels

-Made using the ASAP Pole by Walter Monkhouse: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8XRpqi3dvU

Software

For the majority of the life of the light show, I used Light-O-Rama (http://www.lightorama.com) software.

In 2017, I switched over to Xlights software, as it provides much more flexibility with Pixels and the cost is free (Minus a yearly donation to the developers for the great work!)

Xlights can be downloaded at http://www.xlights.org

Sequences

ALL of the Programming at Germann Lights is done by ourselves. You won’t find any of our sequences on any other houses! Songs can take anywhere from 30-80 hours to complete.

Lights

Most of my lights are WS2811 Pixels – running at either 5V or 12V depending on which light they are. At last count I have about 6,000 RGB Pixels in the light show. These Pixels are obtained by local dealers, as well as directly from Chinese manufacturers.

As of 2022 – we are 100% LED!!!

Controllers

To run scheduling on the Light Show and Run the Light Show itself, I use a Raspberry Pi 3 B+ with FPP (Falcon Pi Player) Installed. https://github.com/FalconChristmas/fpp

I use 2x Falcon F16 controllers and 1x Raspberry Pi with FPP for Christmas. For Halloween, I only need to use 1 Falcon F16 Controller.

To control my pixels, I use a variety of devices, anywhere from SPI to DMX adapters. My main controller these days are the Falcon F16 controllers available at https://www.pixelcontroller.com/store/index.php

A variety of my lights are running direct DMX control via the Falcon’s 3/4 DMX outputs.