I had initially planned on making 3 singing christmas trees using 170 bullet nodes per tree. As with many ideas, this slowly morphed into a star, a tree and a reindeer. After making a prototype tree, the node count also increased to about 220 per face.

For those of you that wish to incorporate singing elements into your display, a word of warning. However long it takes you to sequence a song now - multiply that by 3! Once you have put the lyrics for the whole song into xlights, you then need to align each word with the audio. When this is done, each phenome then needs adjusting to match the audio. Start this in January!

Xlights Singing Faces Download

DOWNLOAD 🔥 https://tlniurl.com/2yGbCD 🔥

The control consists of three parts, a sequence of events, a scheduler to run the sequences and a way to control the lights to match that sequence (called a controller).

Some controllers have their own sequencing (such as WLED running on a ESP8266 or Arduino) or even the Falcon and Advatek Pixlite controllers running pixel test sequences.

For bigger events (or ones which require specific timings), you need a decent sequencing tool. In steps xLights (and yes, there are others such as; Light-O-Rama (aka: LOR), Vixen), but xLights seems to have a massive online community and support, as well as regular updates to the software).

Some people run FPP (Falcon Pi Player, but it now runs on more devices than just a Raspberry Pi) which allows you to run the schedule from a smaller (and cheaper) device without having to use a dedicated PC. But in my setup I have a spare laptop running my custom script, which also hosts xSchedule (part of the xLights software, for scheduling the sequences), and xSchedule talks to controllers connected to my network (to control the lights).

This page isn't about the controllers and scheduler, but instead about the sequencing tool xLights which is how you put together the data (or information) which gets sent to each controller for controlling the pixels.

My lighting setup is a little different to most in the Christmas lighting community for two reasons;1. It is interactive, so the entire show is handled by xSchedule web services, allowing my controlling script to communicate with the website (where users access the show page and submit their requests) and then xSchedule (to process these requests in the lights). Most other Christmas light shows are handled by a playlist running on xSchedule or FPP, where they setup a list of songs to play on a schedule or on repeat.2. I have a dedicated show area where most of my props are located that are used during particular events (when songs, lights changes or easter eggs are played, or messages are shown). When these are running and the show area is being used, the lights at the end of the eaves and around the end of the house, are just doing a background sequence, so that they don't need to shut off because they aren't near the show area and therefore they won't detract from the lights which are involved in the show.

Because of my second reason, where I need to sequence the lights which aren't part of the show differently to the actual show itself, I have had to include that setup in all of my sequences. Which means every sequence I create (or purchase and map to my show), it needs to have these additional props excluded from the normal sequence effects and have a background applied to them so that they can continue to just do color washes and butterfly effects whilst this sequence gets run. Given that I have a few hundred sequences and have to add this to every new sequence, it gets quite time consuming to apply the same effects on these props all the time.

The additional problem I have with this setup, is that these "non" show props are sequenced inside the song (or easter egg, or light change) and means that they are always the same color no matter when the song plays. My show runs up to (and including) Boxing Day (December 26th) with a Christmas theme and then after the 26th of December it runs for a couple of weeks as a Holiday theme. This means the colors transition from the Christmas colors of green, red and yellow to holiday colors of blue, green and yellow. So when the background lights are playing, they are showing the correct colors depending if it's within the Christmas or holiday periods. But when a song plays, or the viewer changes the lights or releases an easter egg, all of these "non" show elements (the ends of the eaves, the eave and star and garage lights at the end of the house) are now the Christmas colors because those are the colors that the song (or egg, or light change) sequence was created with. Which means that if I want the "non" show elements to be holiday colors, I now need two copies of every sequence, one with those props colored with Christmas colors and the second one colored with holiday colors. Which (given the number of sequences I have) is extremely impractical. The movie songs, easter eggs and light changes are available across both the Christmas and holiday periods, meaning that they can be played anytime the lights are running regardless what day it is, but the "non" show props will always be Christmas colors even if they are playing during the holiday period, because their effects and colors are within the same sequence.

For the last couple of years, I've just let the songs (or eggs, or light changes) run with the Christmas background on those "non" show props, but it's kind of annoyed me a little as it means that it's not obvious that my show has transitioned to a holiday show when something is playing, because they are still showing the Christmas colors.

So I started doing some research and came across this video from Keith (who is one of the lead developers of the xLights software), where he talks about Background Playlists in xSchedule (though he calls it "Background Sequences", more correctly it's a playlist which runs one or more sequences).

Turns out I can create a playlist in xSchedule that targets specific channel numbers and then run this as a background playlist so that the sequences in this playlist will play over the top of the sequence currently being played.

What does this mean?Firstly, I can now have a normal song sequence (or easter egg, or light change) which only sequences the props in my show area and doesn't apply any affects against the "non" show props. This means mapping or creating new sequences will be much easier as I don't have to apply the same "single themed" background effects against the props which are not part of the show.Secondly, I can create two sequences against the "non" show props, where one of the sequences is Christmas colors (red, greeen, yellow) whilst the other sequence is holiday colors (blue, green and yellow) and then have two xSchedule playlists, one with the Christmas sequence and one with the holiday sequence. Then my controller will just activate the appropriate one as a background playlist, when a show sequence starts up. Which means the background props which aren't part of the show, will now be displaying their effects in the correct colors.

But; this does mean quite a bit of change and rework;First job was to move my props around on the controllers and have them organised in xLights so that all of the "non" show props are now within a contiguous range of channel numbers. This is because the background playlists in xSchedule allow you to target a start channel and a number of channels to overwrite, meaning that all of these props have to be within this range. This wasn't that difficult to do, as most of these props are on separate controllers to the show props, so I could easily start chaining them, starting from the last channel after all the show props.I could then create the two sequences in xLights, where they apply affects against the "non" show props, one with the Christmas colors and one with holiday colors.Since I now know the start channel (and number of channels) from moving the props around in xLights, I could now create two background playlists in xSchedule using the two sequences which were created, specifying the start channel and number of channels to overwrite.Then I could update my playlist definitions (not the xSchedule ones, but my playlists which I setup to say how today's show is put together, what interactions are available, what plays at what times, etc), which now need to include what xSchedule Background Playlist to activate when a song/egg/light change starts.The big job; now I have to go through ALL of my sequences and re-render them (as the channel layouts have changed, but also change about 80% of them which had the "non" show props being included in the sequence, to now not apply any affects on them as that would be done by the background playlist. Thinking about this, it may not really be necessary to remove the existing effects from these props (as they'd be overwritten by the background playlist anyway), but to clean things up it made sense.Finally, I needed to update my controller script to automatically activate the appropriate background playlist for that days show (using the xSchedule command "Set playlist as background", with the parameter of one of the two xSchedule playlists) when a song, egg or light change started and then remove the background playlist (using the command "Clear background playlist") when the song/egg/light change has completed.

Whew, so what does this all mean?

I can now create (or import) xLights sequences directly onto my show props and not have to worry about applying effects to the "non" show props, where these effects cannot have the colors dynamically changed based on whether the show is in it's Christmas or holiday state. Which means that when my show is running, even if there is a song, egg or light change happening, the background "non" show props are now running with the appropriate colors.

I've been using xLights quite a bit to generate sequences. As mentioned, a sequence is effectively creating light effects to either a musical track or over a given period of time. The sequences are then played using xSchedule or some other tool such as FPP (Falcon PI Player), which lets you push out the different songs or effects into your lights. This lets you setup what sequences will play and in what order (or use an interactive method to allow your audience to choose what to play, which just activates the appropriate sequence). Then you schedule a general sequence to play on repeat until another sequence is scheduled or chosen. 152ee80cbc

mavis beacon platinum 25 free download

meditation for beginners jack kornfield free download

physical activity scale for the elderly questionnaire download