Sequencing Lights

This is where the rubber meets the road. Sequencing simply means telling a program what lights you want to turn on when. 

You don’t need a song yet, but it’s more fun if you have one. Make sure it is an MP3 (not an mp4 or aac or other audio format). For example, I am using iTunes and I had to click File->Create New Version->Create MP3 Version to get my song to work.

Start up the LOR Sequencer and give it your MP3. There are a couple wizards you can use here to get the basic beat. The Beat Wizard (which most seem to have a love/hate relationship with) is not a bad place to start, results vary greatly depending on the song. I assume this is why a lot of people use techno songs with hard constant beats, they make sequencing a lot easier. Eventually, though, you will probably want to switch to the Tap Wizard. Each wizard generates a Timing Grid, basically a click track that you can attach light events to. For my first song I just did the Tap Wizard and clicked my mouse whenever I felt like something should happen. That gave fairly pleasing results for a first pass.

You can have multiple Timing Grids that you can switch between so there is no harm in trying lots of different things. If you use the Beat Wizard, I would add 4x or 8x on the timings. This gives you quarter or eighth notes to time your lights to.

Now you have a grid that you can click lights on and off, fade in, and fade out. Click "Play" to see what happens.

Nothing.

Sneakily you have to select the “Play” menu and tell it to control your lights. If you don’t have your lights connected you can also tell the “Play” menu to “Control Visualizer”. Oooh, what’s that?

Start up LOR Visualizer and draw in your strands of lights as you think they might look in your yard. Accuracy is not too important here. I drew in four vertical lines, my roof line, and a tree. Now right click on the things you drew and select “Properties”. Down at the bottom you will see “Assigned Channels”. Select “Light-O-Rama Controller” for the device and the channel number (“circuit”). Save all that, and click Play.

Again nothing.

That’s OK. Go back to the Sequencer and verify you’ve still got “Control Visualizer” selected in the Play menu. Now click "Play" again in the Sequencer and you should see your Visualizer window start dancing. Congratulations! You are a computer programmer.

There is a lot more to sequencing which entire magazines and classes have been devoted to so I wont go into great detail here. Hopefully this got you started. I’ll try to write about any clever tricks I’ve found, but the best way to learn is look at other people’s sequences and see what they did.  

Lightorama.com has a lot of videos, so does YouTube. Here's one from CrazyChristmasCrew's excellent 15 part Vlog chronicling the creation of his show. It's a great peek into the effort required to put on a great show.

Glossary:

Timing Grid: Often beats in the music, timings are anchors where you can turn lights on and off.

Sequencing: Creating a sequence of actions on a grid that turn your lights on and off.  Since you have to control so many lights and so many musical beats, this can consume months of time.  It is the reason people say “I started my show in June”.

Wizards: Tools to help make sequencing easier.  Beat, Tap, and VU are a few tools to create timings to your music. There are many more.

Running Light-O-Rama on a Mac

A brief detour. As a Mac and Linux user for some decades, I was none too thrilled to find out the LOR software is Windows only. My entire life I've felt roughly the same about Windows as I do about Mesothelioma. Much searching for Mac ports or other software revealed that I had no choice but to run Windows. I’ve programmed serial devices in the past and even considered writing my own LOR driver, but even the protocol is kept highly proprietary.

So…I wasn’t about to buy a new computer, too, so I went in search of the cheapest substitute. 

I found one, free! There are many Windows emulators for modern Macs (Parallels, VMWare, BootCamp). All have drawbacks, mostly price. Enter VirtualBox, a piece of free software currently maintained by Oracle, written by Innotek and open sourced by Sun.

VirtualBox is a marvelous piece of software that allows you to run multiple operating systems at once on one computer. In this case, I chose Windows 7 Home 64 bit. You can download the disk image (iso) from Microsoft at http://technetwindows.blogspot.com/2012/10/windows-7-iso-download-free.html

This gives you a 30 day (or 120 day) trial of fully functioning Windows 7. An hour of downloading later and I had Windows running. Sort of. It kept updating, and rebooting, and updating. Grrr. After about 4 days and 130 or so updates it seems to have settled down.

VirtualBox will let you suspend and resume and keep using your Mac as normal. Some caveats: I have to reinsert the USB cable each time I resume and redo the “AutoConfigure/Refresh” dance to get the software to re-acknowledge the Controller. VirtualBox and OSX seem to compete over the USB ports so you may have issues with things like Printers and iPods too. I usually quit VirtualBox when I’m doing regular Mac stuff. Which turns off my show.

What’s the bottom line? VirtualBox is great and lets you make sequences and control our lights and output sound. I’m running my show off my Mac as I write this. But long term, you’ll probably want a dedicated cheapo Windows machine to run your light show day to day.

Getting Started with the LOR Software

The little manual that comes with the software is pretty good at getting the lights turned on. This is Windows software and ONLY runs on Windows (XP or later). Did I mention I have a Mac? More on that tomorrow.

Note: you can play with this software before you get your controller and see simulated light shows on your computer. This is also helpful for light placement later on.

To get your lights turned on:

1. Download the Light-O-Rama software.
2. Start “LOR Sequencer” and enter your registration code under “Help->Upgrade Lightorama”. Quit the Sequencer for now.
3. Plug everything in, especially the USB cable to your computer.
4. Start the “LOR Hardware” program, change “Max Unit ID” to “10” (that’s 16 in hexadecimal for those geeky enough to care).
5. Click “Auto Configure” then click “Refresh”. This should get the computer to find your controller.
6. If you don’t see any error messages click “On at 100%”, you should see lights.
7. Click things and play around. If you are like me this will occupy you for the rest of the evening.

Next: making those lights dance.

Light-O-Rama!

Yay, the controller came! It’s a phone book sized plastic box with 16 electric plugs sticking out. Here’s an unboxing video from someone in Texas (why are so many big shows in the south?)

When I made the order I was extremely nervous. What did I really need? Browsing the light-o-rama site it is easy to get overwhelmed by all the technology available. Controller boards, SD Cards, Show Directors, Wireless, RGB ribbons (CCR) bulbs (CCB) and pixels (CCP), Floods, etc.

It took a good long time to filter all the noise out and realize ALL I need is the Starter Package. It’s the 16 plug controller box, cables to hook up to your computer, and a program called Light-O-Rama S3. Once you have a few lights plugged in and the software working, you’ve got yourself a light show. The rest is light placement, sequencing, and extension cords, extension cords, extension cords.

Did I just gloss over the computer part? Yeah, well, more on that later. As a Mac user that was an adventure in itself.

Glossary:

Light Controller: a hardware box with 16 outlets that you plug light strands into. You can have any number of these connected to one computer.

Channels: The number of outlets your box has, or the number of things you can independently control from your computer. I am using only 6 right now, because that’s how many extension cords and lights I have.

RGB: since I mentioned it, very cool stuff that is whole different level of crazy. Instead of light strands that come on and off, imagine each bulb is controllable. And can change color (Red/Green/Blue). Basically you can turn your roof into a computer screen. Yet another topic unto itself.

Day One: What just happened to my brain?

I am standing out in the cold watching christmas lights flash, fade, and chase all over my house. The music is timed perfectly with the lights, I obsess over which lights come on with which beats. What additional effects I can add? What if I…. stop. How did this happen?

Allow me to rewind a bit.

I'm the kind of guy who likes to decorate at Halloween and Christmas, but I don't usually put more than a couple hours effort into decorating. The tree gets two strands of lights, the living room maybe two or three more. Outside if I'm daring I'll put a few strands of white along the reachable gutters and maybe a couple more multicolored strands in a small tree.

I was happy with that.

Over the years I started seeing some pretty elaborate Halloween decorations that I thought were cool. Fog machines, light displays, animatronics, things that really created an emotional mood. At Christmas every neighborhood has houses with great lights on them. I always enjoy seeing them, but I never felt compelled to add to my modest display.

Then last year I saw this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8XG4jY9MCYk

One guy, with a computer, time, and passion made something beautiful and memorable, and I decided I must do something. What he did looked completely over the top, but it was exciting and original and absolutely worth the effort (little did I know how much restraint he had shown in his production, more on that later).

But how did he do that? Is there an easy way to get started making computer light shows? A little googling and I ended up at www.lightorama.com. This company is pretty much the only game in town as near as I can tell. OK, but the most basic controller was $300(!). Whew, how serious am I about this? That's a steep entry fee for a dabbler like myself. I put it off.

Fast forward to two weeks ago when I took the plunge and just ordered the "Starter Kit" and hoped for the best. I am glad I did, but it is a tremendously slippery slope. I've spent most of my waking hours over the last two weeks reading, learning, sequencing, and planning how to do more. With the rest of this blog I hope to chronicle the journey, the uncertainty, the mistakes, the successes, and perhaps ease the way for those to come after.

Welcome to the ride.