Blue Moon Lights

Welcome to the 2021 season of Blue Moon Lights!

Tune your radio to 93.5 FM when at the house to hear the music.

This year, the new addition is my four “singing bulbs”. The arches have also made a return to this year.

For those that like numbers, there are 5607 individually controllable light bulbs or “pixels” in the display this year.

Current Show Lineup (subject to change)

• “We overslept”
• Christmas Everyday
• “Warmup Disaster”
• Zero – from Ralph Breaks the Internet
• “Blue has a zit”
• 12 Days of Christmas – Straight No Chaser version
• Bring us a Candle by the Marsh Family
• “Wrong Show”
• Mary Did you Know
• “Top This!”
• Carrol of the Bells – Lindsey Sterling
• “Thanks for Watching”
• You Make it Feel Like Christmas

The ones in quote, are original scripts written for the Singing Bulbs, performed by Amy Hartsough, Rachel Kenney-Brown, Patrick Kenney-Brown, and James Drews

A Playlist of this years show is available here.

There is a project that has been putting together snipits from light shows all doing the same song. xlights around the world. For the second time, I have participated in the project. The video for this year is up for this year. My house is at 45 seconds in to the video. xlights is the software that I have been using to create the light display.

Have 6 of the 9 songs for this year posted for viewing on the videos page now.

I had a visit from someone who left me a hand written thank you:

Was previewing most of the show this evening to see how well the “simulator” matched up with reality. Found I incorrectly hung one of the snowflakes (derp). I’ll correct that in software. Found a few other little tweaks to make here and there. Getting closer!

There are a few “not going to be fixed” issues (couple bad pixels, and a few that popped out). Minor, but with all that it has taken to get to this point, I’ll live with them (and I know, most people would never notice).

Almost everything is complete. Missing some hooks to put out two items (should arrive tomorrow). I have re-secured all the items the wind took down. Added more attachment points for all of them (why I ran out of hooks), and hoping this will make it the entire season.

Tonight, we are getting some very high winds. All the props above the garage have come down. So far, the ones around the front room are holding, but I question for how much longer. Not too much damage to the snowflakes, but will need to spend some time popping the pixels back in to many of the spots.

Took advantage of the unusually warm weather to take care of all the work needing a ladder (Note: I really hate ladders).

What better thing to do on a hot summers day, than to think Christmas! Yes, the work for the next season is well under way. New props are ordered (early July delivery), and “in theory”, the layout of what I will be including in the display has been decided on. I only say, “in theory” because last year, I kept changing things up to the last minute before putting things out in the yard. I’m sure that will happen again this year, but will have to wait and see. After all, there is still 5 months before it goes up in to the yard.

Already have 4 songs ready to go. Three are from last year, one new so far.

Have one issue with the show yet that I have been trying to work out. The short version – the computer that plays back has a video card in it that is too old. What does the video card have to do with running lights you ask? Good question. For one of the songs, there is a lighting effect that uses an OpenGL shader. This is just a fancy way of saying, there is a lot of graphics processing going on to decide what each bulb should be doing. The play computer doesn’t support OpenGL v3. When it gets to that part of the song, all the lights change to a cyan color (which the docs say, your OpenGL isn’t supported).

There are a couple of options to fix this.

One, get a new play computer (too expensive).

Two, use the gaming computer I do the programming on. Don’t want to do this either as it means I have to leave a power hungry computer on.

Three, get a Raspberry PI and use the Falcon FPP player softwaret

Tonight, I picked option 3, and got a raspberry pi 4 on the way home from work. A few hours later, it is up and running. xLights (the software I use to do the lights) has support for the player built in, and can upload the config and song files easily. The one song that had issues plays just fine now. Down side, two other songs don’t really play. The music plays, but the lights don’t. The other songs work fine. Guess I have one more thing to figure out yet…