Christmas in Applegate

Here’s where we talk about how this show works!

There’s at least 20,000 individual light bulbs in the show.   We started much smaller, but have grown every year.  We stopped counting awhile ago, especially after LED’s started coming out, because it’s so much easier to just keep adding lights than to count them!

Each string of lights is assigned to a “channel” on a light controller.  Each channel can be controlled independently.  Each light controller usually has 16 channels.  There’s 19 controllers currently in use in the show this year.  That’s 304 different channels that can be on or off, fade up or down, blink, or even “sparkle!”

We use so many channels to allow us to have lights that “leap” like water, to have snowflakes that fall, and even have a tree that spins!   Most of the time, only a fraction of all the lights are turned on, which helps out with the Duke Power bill in November and December!

We use Animation Director software on a normal PC to program a master controller box that holds the programs and music.  The master controller box or “brain” is the one that plays the music and tells each controller box when to turn a channel on or off.

You can hear the music in your car, since we broadcast the music with a low-power Ramsey FM transmitter.  It has just enough range for you to hear it up and down the street.  This year, we picked 92.7 FM, since there weren’t any local FM stations near that frequency.  Last year, we thought we had a good frequency, but then we found the FM station in Roanoke VA on 89.9 FM was on the same one, and bled through sometimes at night.

We built some of the frames to hold the lights on the house and roof.  It makes it much easier to just hang the whole frame up, than to try to attach the lights to the house.  The frames on the roof were built to break down into smaller pieces that store and stack easily.