Every year, it seems there are more and more extravagant displays of programmed Christmas lights. This year is the most impressive so far—so impressive, the tech side of me wants to do something along these lines, while the religious side of me balks at how much time/money was spent on these displays (even if they use LEDs... that's a lot of power, and a lot of cost/material for the bulbs and cords!).
Anyways, for your enjoyment, here are two of my favorite displays:
Little Drummer Boy
This neighborhood synchronized lights to different songs among 13 different houses. Lots of wireless controllers, I presume:
Click through to see more...
Snowball Blaster - the Game
With a slight bit of 8-bit graphics/sounds thrown into the mix, this looks like it's actually pretty fun... and on par with the graphics of an Atari, at least :-)
Most Expensive Electric Bill...
This family will apparently pay $82,320 to light their house for this Christmas season:
Comments
Regarding the first video on your list here of lights. Its not as hard as you think it is, and the cost is not that bad. If you were doing only one house, you could do it for under $200. And that would include lights. This entire project is all DIY. You build the boards, you program the sequences, and you set it up and plug it in. Oh and the software is FREE.
If you would like more information, check out this site, http://doityourselfchristmas.com/forums/forum.php
it has all the information you would ever need and the people on it are more than willing to help.
Oh and yes, I am the designer of this display, but only by God's grace.
Cool! I would imagine the highest cost would be the electric bill, though—but that depends highly on what kind of lights you'd be using, and how long the lights would be on through the night.
Our displays normally run from 5:30pm to 10:00pm every night, starting Thanksgiving night and running thru Dec 31. As for the electric bill, because we switched over to LED's completely this year, our electric bill went up only $9.43.
The special part of this entire display, is being able to wish so many people a very Merry Christmas. Even with no media coverage this year, we estimate over 5000 attended on Christmas Eve alone. We saw so many smiles on everyones faces. What a joy.