Backstage

2011 Backstage:
 
The Lights:
Our 2011 display has 40,003 lights in six colors (Red, Yellow, Green, Blue, Violet, and White).
 
Power:
The lights we are using this year require 120A (14,400W) of electricity when they are turned on all at once. Power is run to the display from a dedicated subpanel (breaker box) via ten 20A circuits. Fortunately we don't turn them on all at once most of the time (although a couple songs do for a brief moment). This year's display required about a mile of custom extension cords.
 
Light Counts (how we've grown):
2005: 8,000
2006: 32,000
2007: 35,500
2008: 36,392
2009: 41,139
2010: No Show
2011: 40,003

 
Computer Control:
With all the lights and power in place comes the real challenge: synchronizing them to music. Doing so requires a way to interface the lights with a computer, and a way to program the computer with a set of commands to tell the lights what to do (and when to do it). The electronics necessary to make this happen consist of 224 channels of D-Light controllers running the new open source DMX firmware. The software which controls the lights is known as Aurora (we wrote it). Each song takes about 10 hours of time to synchronize to music. The music is transmitted to visitor's FM radios by a low power FM transmitter (FCC part 15 compliant) on an empty FM station.
 
Channel Counts (how we've grown):
2005: Not animated
2006: 63 (8x D-Light ACx8)
2007: 96 (8x D-Light ACx8, 1x D-Light DCx16, 2x D-Light ACx16)
2008: 210 (8x D-Light ACx8, 1x D-Light DCx16, 6x D-Light ACx16, 4x D-Light Firefli)
2009: 368 (6x D-Light ACx8, 1x D-Light DCx16, 6x D-Light ACx16, 4x D-Light Firefli, 1x DMX Intelligent Light)
2010: Now Show
2011: 368* (6x D-Light ACx8 DMX, 1x D-Light DCx16 DMX, 6x D-Light ACx16 DMX, 4x D-Light Firefli, 1x DMX Intelligent Light)

 
Setting It All Up:
So, with all of that in place, how long does it take to hang all of those lights? The setup of our 2011 display began in late October and will take until December 1 to complete (over a full month). They all come down in just a couple days though.
 
The Mega-Tree:
Of particular interest is our 16 foot tall animated Christmas tree. First used in 2006, this display element was custom made by us out of plumbing parts just for this display. The support pole and star were assembled on the ground and then raised into place and anchored by four steel cables. A shape ring was then constructed at the base of the tree. Lights were raised onto the tree and secured between the eye bolts at the top and the shape ring at the bottom. All of the lights except for the star may be lowered and re-raised on the tree for servicing (replacing bulbs, bad sections, etc.). The mega tree consists of 12,440 lights.
 
The Leaping Arches Introduced in 2008 are the four arches in the foreground of the display. These arches each consist of 16 individually controllable RGB pixels contained on a special D-Light Firefli strand. This allows us to control the exact color out of 16 million possible colors that each pixel should be throughout the show.
 
So how much is the electric bill?
Because the lights are not always on (each “channel” in only on for brief periods of time) the bill is far less than you might guess. In 2009 it only cost $70 to run the display for the entire Christmas season. Our anticipated electricity cost this year is calculated to be about the same. Electricity turns out to be one of the cheapest things in the entire display.