The Holiday House

Planning for the Holiday House 2011 has already started. We’ve been at it for months, actually! We have been testing and selecting new products to bring our imagination to life on this years Holiday House, and we have some big surprises in store. One of the biggest changes will be the switch to LED lights in lieu of incandescent bulbs. But these aren’t just any ordinary LED lights! They are much brighter then what you can get at your local Store, weatherproof for our inevitable Winter Weather, and are being custom made to specifications just for our show! This season, the Holiday House features over 100,000 Christmas Lights carefully synchronized to a wide variety of holiday music. We first introduced this project in 2005 and had an amazing turnout. From busses to limos to people walking down the street, people came from all over to see the show. Some nights we would entertain 500 to 1000 people, and this year we hope to share some holiday cheer with even more of you. For more info and behind the scenes:
Visit ‪http://www.LightUpXmas.com
Follow us on Twitter #TheHolidayHouse
Like us on ‪http://www.facebook.com/TheHolidayHouseShow
 A little more about our crazy Christmas lights....

 2006 was our first season with our new, Hybrid controller design. It is 288 channels, each using a 20-Amp Solid State Relay driven by a digital I/O board, but sharing a bank of 36 DMX industrial dimmers. The number of lights on each channel of our display far exceeds the current capacity of off-the-shelf DIY controllers, so ours can actually handle the full 20 Amps per each channel, within the limits of available power to our controller, which was on it's own 400 Amp sub-panel. We designed the Hybrid system because the cost of commercial DMX can approach $200 per channel, when this amount of power is being used. 

Our software was designed entirely in-house, addressing some limitations of the commercial products available at the time. It supports over 32,000 channels, and manages the Hybrid Digital I/O-Over-DMX technology that we developed by mapping the DMX banks to the underlying I/O channels
automatically.

Audio Synch is maintained by a proprietary timing function which locks the show to the actual data stream from the audio track, ensuring perfect synch every time, at speeds even exceeding the normal DMX frame rate. In those cases, our software has a look-ahead algorithm to predict upcoming
high-speed sequence components, and pre-sets the DMX banks accordingly, using the Digital I/O for the High-Speed elements.

The show features more than 130,000 lights and 10+miles of extension cords. The lights took approximately 2 weeks to hang with the help of a 60 foot boom truck. On our busy nights we had 500-1000 people standing in the street watching the show.

We hope you enjoyed this as much as we enjoyed making it. We are currently working on a new, even more spectacular show for the 2011 season, using new technology and software we have been developing. Watch our progress at ‪http://www.LightUpXmas.com.

In 2006 The Holiday House raised 7000+ Cans of Food for the Hungry! Thank You Sacramento!