After the final push there wasn’t much left to do to get the show live for our annual light up party. I’d actually taken Friday afternoon off work to finish any last pieces and work out any bugs but really didn’t need it. I did happen across some LED candy canes at home depot which were on sale for $8.88 so I bought 8 sets to replace my existing incandescent ones, now I had one more build task to do (I also realized I hadn’t hooked the candy canes into the controller so good thing I looked closer at them).
On Friday night I ran through most of the sequences to make sure they were acting as I expected. On Saturday I woke up at 3:30am and couldn’t get back to sleep so I decided to start working on another sequence; Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer. I decided to start from scratch vs. converting last years. Its a short song and I managed to get if finished before the kids woke up.
I also undertook a second sequence with my oldest son after he got up; Jingle Bells, Batman smells a little fun for the hockey team that will be over collecting bottles before the light up.
After this I created a quick 1 min animation sequence to display the hockey associations logo on the pixel tree and colour the house like their hockey socks.
I then created the show for the light up. I ended up with 14 songs complete. I converted each into a playback file and then built a show for the night with the Hockey 1 min sequence between each song, I do this on my main show with different sequences between each song, these 1 min animations also make the non musical bookends to my show.
Once I had the show built I did a test run while I installed my new candy canes, everything ran through and worked great. I also added my new sign. Everything was installed and ready to go.
I’ll make a separate post to show some of the show pictures and Videos.
Chasin' Rudolph 