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I won the contest the one year I did not enter it


ryebred

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Ever since I started decorating with a static display and the four years I have done an animated display, I have entered our cities holiday lights contest. In the beginning it was just to get my house on the map because everyone that entered got their address shown on the city lights display map.

 

The winners used to have some great displays and would get articles done up on them in the local city paper. Over the years my display got better and better and the competition got worse so when I got into the animated arena I anticipated winning. However, I never won and I would visit the houses of the winners and was confused because some were very sparsely decorated. The one year I entered for best tree instead of best display, the guy that won had about 400 multi color mini lights strung in a tree in his front yard that blinked. That was it. I had a 20 foot tall, 5300 light mega tree that was animated and could change colors.

 

The contest is judged by the Senior's at the Senior Center so I figured they didn't like LED or didn't understand the technology or music aspect of it. This year I decided not to bother with the contest anymore as they stopped doing newspaper articles a while ago and the winners are buried in a small section on the city website that probably not many see. I have also been having technical issues with my WS2811 pixels from Ray Wu and didn't want a bunch of people coming when a lot of my pixels were burning out.

 

Then, my wife got called yesterday from the City to say that we won the best holiday display this year. Apparently someone else nominated me even though I did not enter the contest myself. Ironic how I win the one year I don't enter it. Now I just need to hope the pixels hold out until Christmas.

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I was having problems with the pixels also, especially the one day it has rained here. I replaced all the bad pixels and sprayed the wire entry end with a rubberized spray to seal them. So far no new problems but it also hasn't rained since I sprayed them.

 

Congratulations on the win, Now go to my website at www.insanelights.com and click on the Vote For Me in the lower left of the home page and cast a vote so I can try and win our valley wide contest ;)  ;) . Wish me luck.

 

I went to your website to see videos and the only one I saw for this year is your RGB mega tree(nice job sequencing by the way. What did you use to sequence it?). I would love to see the rest of your display, post some more videos soon and let me know.

 

Ken

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I voted for your house last week Ken. You did a good job and do indeed have an "Insane" amount of lights.

 

I was finally able to grab some video of the display since I have had four nights without a pixel failure. (knock on wood) Below are two videos that I have uploaded.

 

I had a gal from the local newspaper call me the other night and she asked me to describe my display and I started to say that we have 21,000 LED lights and she stopped me and asked what LED was. She apparently has never heard of LED. Needless to say the rest of the interview did not go much better. It will be interesting to see what the final article will look like.

 

Christmas Eve Sarajevo

 

 

Wizards of Winter

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Those two videos I posted above were sequenced with the Superstar sequencer. Out of 16 sequences in my show, 4 were sequenced with SuperStar, and the rest were a combination of manual RGB sequencing and Nutcracker. Nutcracker can produce some nice effects and save you a ton of time but there is a limited set of effects in Nutcracker. You can combine effects to produce variations but sequences will start to look very similar and you dont have great control on getting the effect to synchronize with the beat of the music; it is just an effect playing in the background.

 

Some of my CCR sequences that I have done the last four years transferred to the pixel tree quite nicely so that saved some time as well.

 

Next year I plan to try and use Superstar more so that at least half of my sequences are done using that software.

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