ElBanquos Multipicture Christmas Lightchain

What's the idea?

I like to amaze people with riddles and small wonders. My favourite approach is to establish little miracles that can only be noticed by people that observe the world carefully (its not for the 7x24 smartphone viewers). A long term vision was doing this with christmas decoration lights that change their pattern or picture without attracting attention by blinking or fast changing colors.

People should see the picture in the window and next time they come by will see another picture. They may wonder if they remembered it correctly or they might think that the guy behind the window changes it manually every day. Only if they watch long enough they will see, how the pattern of light evolves slowly from one picture to another. Maybe they get curious enough to wait, what picture will come next and if they have seen them all.

While I prefere the slow change in the christmas time, I could not resist the idea to use the installation for simulation some fireworks on new years eve. So I also added a new years eve countdown clock and some fireworks animations just for that special day.

Features

• Choose and display one of the 19 programmed pictures
• Transition softly to another random picture after some time
• Transtionanimation will also be randomly created (order of lamps, duration of fades)
• Multiple lamps will transition asynchronously to each other
• Calibratable light sensor to switch automatically from/to energy saving mode during daylight or indoor light
• "Countdown to Midnight" Clock mode, that can be set with seconds precision
• Fireworks mode with 5+ different patterns
• Easy maintainable programming of the light patterns
• Picture is described on a logical lamp arrangement. Translation to physical arrangement on the window is done at runtime.
• Colorpalette helps to keep colors conistent an save memory.
• Pixels can be distributed over multiple chains but appear in a linear adressspace
• Multiple and easy extendable firework animations
• Testmodes to check: correct lamp placement, pictures, electrical function of whole chain

Main assembly steps in pictures