2025 check in: how is your show going, what are you planning for 2026?

2025 bought a few problems this year with the tune to screen of p5 panels blowing fuses after a couple of hours running and not being able to find the cause I set up an old TV screen in the window and ran it off the PI from the p5 panel so I will have to look into the problem during the year
Went out to christmas dinner expeting to coming home with the display working but for what ever reason it decided not to on Xmas day and as I was late coming home decided not to run iton Xmas night as it was after 11 and I need to keep the neighbours happy so I will run it for the rest of December
Had some one try to steal my speakers out of the front gandern but they could not get them out of the bushes in the dark
Changed the display this year and removed the Mega tree as I was having problems with putting it up and replaced it with EFL Showstopper Phat Boy and a couple of EFL Showstopper Mini Trees also added some seed pixels Vertical around the Garage and front door way
Added a showstopper spinner to the roof of the garage that kept on blowing over so just laid it on the roof instead of having it vertical
Also added a push button for Santa to appear in the top story window that the kids really enjoyed and had quite a few people waving back to him when he appeared
Crowds were a bit smaller this year as there were no posting of the show this year on social media which I was happy with being a court and having traffic problems in the past
Overall I think it was a great year and enjoyed the happy faces and look forward to 2026
 
Had a pretty good year. We did a totally new show again. after a year off in 2024. Changed most of my vital props over to the YPS DUOs after a horrid year of failures in 2023 with my ETOP stock. Had absolutely no pixel issues at all this year. Not a single failure. Did have a weird problem when testing the show with the output of my Baldrick 8 flickering. Turned out it was because I had artnet multicast broadcast running from my Onyx lighting desk which was for some reason affecting the Baldrick. Turning of ARTNET multicast fixed it immediately but it a took a few days of fiddling to finally realise what was going on. We had a lamp blow on a moving head which exploded glass everywhere internally. Hours meter was only on 600 but I suspect it had been reset on before I bought it on marketplace. So I cleaned it up on the roof and replaced the lamps in all 4 moving heads just in case. Should've just done that as a matter of course when I first bought them. At least now I know they have properly recorded hours on them! We had low crowds until the week before Christmas. Once school holidays started the numbers built. The last 2 days were pretty nuts and almost a the max capacity I'd want here. Lots and lots of people coming through. We did notice this year that people were staying for the whole 27 min show. In the past they've only stayed for 10-15 mins cos they were touring lots of lights in the area. It's a big effort doing such a long show that's a full production but it was worthwhile. We only just got the show up and running in time and I didn't quite get the moving heads added to all the songs before we launched on Dec 12. I managed to get them programmed on all songs by Dec 19. Certainly it's lots of layers of things to get going but it's lots of fun to see it all working well and people enjoying the show. We had one noise complaint although we were being super careful with volume. But I tried to do my best to keep it at acceptable levels. It's hard when people turn up at 11pm and turn their stereo up to full and sing out the car windows haha. Anyway was a great year. Will be interesting to see what happens in 2026!.
 
2025 was a bit quiet on the improvement front. Only did the small garage door which took a few goes and prototypes to get right (ended up 3D Printing a panel, and learning how not resilient seed pixels really are) but the results came out pretty well. Spent the rest of my time sequencing up the 3 songs this year. No major prop failures, but a bit of flickering going on that I'll need to diagnose and mark for next year.

Like everyone, the weather stopped an earlier start, but having said that - started 7th December which seems like a good time to get started. Recorded the show the first two nights before the steady but quiet stream started to filter through. In previous years, we've had passing mentions on the noticeboard(s) and you'd see a bit of a spike here and there, but this year someone did add us to a map which correlated to a ridiculous number of cars in the small street (and we didn't find it until Christmas Eve - the damage was done). Need a new strategy for next year in preparation for it happening again.

For 2026, I suppose it'll be:

- Design new singing Christmas Trees. They're feeling a bit stale, and in need of a bit more personality.
- Replace the Mini Trees - they are falling apart, and they aren't really compatible with the landscaping so will probably go some flat tree designs.
- Rework the lawn props so that they are more complementary to the landscaping - this will be a challenge, given the musical nature the trees play in my sequencing.
- Think long and hard about whether I want to do the bigger garage door with seed pixels.
- Think about a 'heavy traffic' mode that effectively turns off the radio and runs speakers only.
- Look to do 1-2 "Show Format" of 12-15 minute intervals to help keep cars moving - possibly aiming for smaller or mixing songs instead of full songs.

Merry Christmas all, have a great new year.

P.S. No pixel failures this year! ... well, not ones during the season*. Need to work out the art of replacing seed pixels. Every one I cut and spliced caused an interesting issue where the node replaced after a splice replicated or was treated as the same node as before it. I'm sure there's some logical reason, but that was annoying to find out during setup!
 
People seem to be enjoying my show again this year. Light wands (2000) have all been given out as of the day before yesterday. Candy cane stocks should be fully depleted today or tomorrow. So I guess the quantities were about right. Weather may have kept the crowds down by 20% overall, but I'm not minding it too much.

10m snowman tore quite badly this year. As I stitched up 5' of rips, it was clear that the fabric has gotten much weaker over his 13 years of life. Tore again just a couple days later, so this will be the last season for him. Brought a lot of joy to a lot of people... but we will have to come up with something new and different to take his place next year.

From the technical side, getting rid of the Genius controllers and upgrading all HinksPix to V3 boards, much smoother playback, glad I did it. Also, no efuse gremlins. The kind of thing only a show owner would notice, but still the best thing I did all year.

New P5 panel. Looks great, viewers like it. The poor planning part is that even though it is 4 cabinets, I needed to hire help to get it up there, and out of all the Mean Wells in the show it was the only thing ever to have one die (meaning more help to get it down, fixed, and reinstalled). Not sure how I will get it down, or if it will be there for a while. So, more thought is required on this.

Use of the P5 panel threw off my fine-tuned power scheme. I will need another circuit or two to have some margin again next year.

New spiral trees with the lumidot pixels look quite nice. The gems in the waving snowman, well, some sequences I didn't get him waving properly, and the gems themselves look a little weird. P5 ChromaStockings, I like them better than everyone else does. Snowflakes I replaced are just snowflakes.

Using a service to map most of the sequences was a big time saver, does as well as I do (on those sequences anyway), so I'm glad I did that. Now, how to get the rest of them to work automatically as well.

New show player has been giving me fits of apoplectic conniptions... maybe bad idea.

Additional steps will have to be taken against rodents in 2026.

Other than new sequences, I don't plan to do much to my show for 2026. I hope to do a small show for July 4th 2026, so that will take most of the build effort, and might refresh a couple more controllers. There are some incomplete projects around here that could get finished... would like a pixel forest or cube, and I have the parts for most of this, just need to do it. Still need to 3D print some frames for these minimega trees. My megatrees could use a refresh, but I doubt that next year will be the year. All kinds of ideas, no chance of getting it all done, bring on 2027 and 2028...
 
Recently bought myself a megatree - So that will be my 1st "real" prop to be installed....... Excited to say the least!!
 
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