You have come across many videos where Christmas lights have been programmed such that they follow the rhythm of the music. Probably you saw it at your neighbor’s house during the New Year celebrations. If you want to do it at your home, you need to equip yourself with some coding skills and assemble the necessary equipment to make lights blink to a favorite tune. Here are some of the steps that you can follow to achieve your dream during the next Christmas or New Year celebrations.
- Decide on the Size of the Lights
Costs involved will play a significant role in determining the size of the lights you will be having in your home. You can make a big lighting system in your whole home or some parts of the homestead either inside in the house or outside in the garden. Despite considering the cost, some of the factors that you should consider when determining the size of the lights include channels that can be controlled individually and the source of power. You should consider a maximum of 64 channels in your system with some channels on a Christmas tree with an angel tree topper on it with a single set of lights.
- Stock Up
Buying the necessary lighting systems is an expensive strategy that you have to approach carefully. Different stores such as Target, Walmart, Lowe’s, KMart, and Home Depot sell the necessary lighting materials at varying prices. Buy from the cheapest store to save some bucks for wine. You can consider buying on the internet retail outlets where you will get bulbs and other wires at discounted rates and leverage on their shipment offers. The best time to purchase lighting materials should be just after Christmas where you can get lights at $0.50 unlike before the celebrations days where you will get them at around $2. You can as well buy a control system that will connect your laptop with the lighting system and help you to control various channels by the click of a mouse.
- Program Your System
For you to control your lights so that they can be consistent with the music playing on the system, you should program your software so that it helps each channel to fade, turn off, turn on, or even twinkle when you want. You should make sure that the whole system has been coded with the coding language that you can understand exhaustively so that you don’t leave any stone unturned. Having a primary programming language will come in handy as you will not need to buy some software to control your lighting system. If you are not a tech-wizard, you can consider buying software from the internet or get a template where you can fill the necessary codes for your program to work.
- Coding Your Program
You can code each channel such that it is represented by a particular program and ensure that the color twinkling from each LED has been coded with an appropriate programming language such as Java or C++. For example, your system should be able to run the following code and produce results.
int tree1 = 13;
int tree2 = 12;
int tree3 = 11;
int tree4 = 10;
int tree5 = 9;
int tree6 = 8;
void setup() {
pinMode(tree1, OUTPUT);
pinMode(tree2, OUTPUT);
pinMode(tree3, OUTPUT);
pinMode(tree4, OUTPUT);
pinMode(tree5, OUTPUT);
pinMode(tree6, OUTPUT);
If the above code runs in your program, your channels should start showing some lights at the tune of the selected music.
- Design Your Display
After coding and developing the program to run and control your lighting system, the next step is designing your display. This is the outer part of your system that will be seen by the people at the party. Some of the things that you will need to design include landscaping lights, mini trees with multiple colors, mega trees made with large poles and large lights extending from top to bottom forming a considerable animation, and wireframes with lights attached. You can as well have lighted sculptures which will be placed throughout the yard. Finally, you can also include colorful lights that will go on the yard perimeter.
- Program Your Show
The final step involves programming your show by selecting all the music that you want to play during the big day. Given that you are a beginner, you will need time to plan this due to the length of your show and the number of channels you have in your whole system.
Coding the lights on your house or the entire compound in your homestead is not a simple strategy. You need to invest some money in buying some lights while at the same time ensuring that you purchase everything that is required. Most importantly, you need to spend some time to gain some coding skills.
