Neil from Messick's here to give you a walk around of our annual Christmas light show if you've ever seen people doing Christmas lights on the internet many of us wire things up in approximately the same way our show though is a little bit different it's put on our building here with flood lights pixel strips down roof lines but most interestingly incorporates tractors and some tractor features into the show. We're going to walk you around out here show you how a little bit of it works show you how we incorporate the machinery into our show this year's show.
You're going to be able to see it here in our Elizabethtown location December 4th to the 29th running every night from 6 until 9 30. This is going to be our seventh year of Christmas light shows. We collect donations from people as you leave it's money that we simply turn around and give to local charities there's no expense to coming in and watching the show itself but amazingly over the years over 317 thousand dollars has been dropped in our coffee cans as people have been leaving these shows. It is amazing the amount of people that come out to this thing and check it out so come along with me here we're going to walk around and take a look at this year's Christmas light show. So the show itself sits behind me here and if you've come and seen this in years past you're going to notice the setup here looks a little bit different.
We're in the middle of a fairly severe equipment shortage at this point most years there's the better part of about 30 tractors that take up the front two rows here of the light show and this year we're not able to manage that. We simply don't have enough equipment in order to be able to set that much stuff up here to be able to run a full Christmas light show with the same layouts that we've generally used in the past. Another thing that's missing back here would be the excavator arches you see back here in the middle we've got one large arch there holding the tree consisting of a machine out of our rental fleet and a used one because we have basically no new excavators in stock at this point there's usually four more machines back there constructing other arches. Those arches are cool because we can bounce an animation the whole way down and and kind of do a leaping arch effect across the back of the show but some creative programming here this year we've eliminated that in turn and replaced it here with other things. So our claim to fame here with Christmas lights has usually been that we go and we wire the headlights and the tail lights of the tractors actually into the show.
Now on a bx series machine that's really easy because we can pull all the bulbs and everything off of those machines swap leds in their place so that we have a low current bulb that we can put in there. It's a lot friendlier on all of our electronics but on these bigger tractors we don't have that option. Those automotive bulbs don't swap in and out quite as easily. So as an alternative we've gone to using artilian work lights up here on the roll bars. They cast a lot of light gives a really cool crowd liner effect when you're up here watching the show.
These light tubes are one of my very favorite things that we have out here in the show. Inside of each one of these tubes there's a strip and about every inch down that strip there's an led that can be either red green or blue kind of giving us all colors around this tube. Now you're going to notice here how large this prop is compared to the tractor that it's on. As we've kind of committed to doing this every year we've started building more and more things that we can kind of just get out of the shed and put onto the machine without having to build things from scratch every year. This is a little hook here that's made out of rebar for us to throw up over a tire and very quickly have this nice circular pattern here that follows around the wheel. You'll notice here though how big my circle is compared to the wheel that it sits on. All of these pieces were sized for larger m series tractors that we would have used last year.
This year we've got actual standard L series machines, an L3560 limited edition, when I say standard it's that limited edition model that we're using this year so you'll see our hoods are a little bit too big and our tires are a little oversized. In the dark though you're never really actually able to tell the difference you just see a cool outline of an animated tractor.
Behind me here is kind of our centerpiece prop, it's a gigantic christmas tree. This has 16 of these led light strips kind of the same thing that's used in that tube that runs around the wheel. Each one has 300 lights from the top to the bottom creating this really dense array of leds that we can run animations across creating some really intricate effects that are fun to watch. Each one of these shows takes about 300 hours to put together from beginning to end from going through and actually writing all the software that sequences the music to what's supposed to be happening out in the parking lot to hanging everything putting light strips up on the roofs wrapping tractors in christmas lights it takes a team of people to pull this off off every year and fortunately there's about a half a dozen of us that come out here and do most of this work.
So while there's about 300 hours really in total each one of us puts in about a week's worth of our time out here in order to get all this going. Now if you geek out here with me a little bit I'm actually kind of the computer electronics guy that does a lot of the infrastructure of how all this works. I'm not musical my vastly more talented brothers do a lot of that sequencing on the musical side but I'm kind of the IT guy here at Messick's and I take care of a lot the computer networking stuff which translates directly into the networking of how all of our christmas lights work.
These right here are called lightarama controllers. Lightarama is one of the first big companies that was out there for sequencing lights. It's a very consumer friendly thing to get into, if you've seen people doing this on their homes and stuff before, the odds are they're using a lot of the same hardware that we do in order to do that, we just have a lot more of it. You're going to notice here in the back of the tractors most of these boxes. Now they're either going to have 8 or 16 pigtails coming out of the bottom of them at which we go in and we plug the lights into.
So when you look at a tractor like this the roll bars and the hoods are all separate channels that are independently plugged into each one of these and every plug that comes out of here then becomes something that we can control. This however is a very old school way of doing it compared to a lot of the more modern stuff that we have on the pixel controllers. So the fan out of plugs coming out of the older controllers gives us a single thing that we can control right that plug can be turned on turned off or or dimmed essentially.
However with a lot of this pixel stuff now we're now using computer networks and everything in order to control huge numbers of pixels. That big tree that I was showing you here earlier would have 150 pixels on each one of those strips and there's going to be 16 strips so where we have 4 500 leds more or less across that whole thing each one being able to do red green or blue so you have 15 16 thousand individual channels that would be controlling that big tree. That's just way more than you can ever control in the software itself and so modern christmas light control now is moving to what's called a dmx. Basically theater lighting control and this specifically is done over a tcp ip network or ethernet just like all of your computer stuff would be at home. I enjoy joking with people telling you that my christmas lights have ip addresses right, just like a computer network in all of your devices there have ip addresses so do my christmas lights. So there's going to be four different ip address controllers out here that run these big collections of pixels that we have on the trees and the roof lines creating really dense smooth animated effects.
Those ip addresses are nice for a couple of reasons. Computer networks are very reliable, very easy for me to debug compared to the industrial control protocol that's used on the older light controllers, when those cables get wet they get really finicky, it's a lot easier to debug ethernet cables and computer switching than it is that, and you can also shove a lot more data through it. Those older cables are kind of like the dial-up modem of years ago, right? You get about 56k 64k specifically across those wires and when you start running animations that are this fast those things can't keep up and your animations start to lag behind or you know not everything looks super crisp and fast as it should. Switching that over to ethernet or dmx specifically really speeds up those effects and it's a lot easier for me in order to debug.
So more and more of this stuff we're moving to these more advanced computer network type systems as years go by. All this sounds awfully expensive really probably. It's not actually all that bad. A controller in here that's able to do 16 dmx universes somewhere in the neighborhood of you know this probably 16 17 000 individual control items is a $200 controller. So it's actually surprisingly affordable um especially when you consider you know the money that we're raising and that kind of stuff it's very easily justified to put that money into this show in order to get that kind of money out of it.
Something I'm really sensitive to when it comes to giving money to charity is how much is the organization collecting that money kind of skimming off the top. It's important for you to know that this entire thing is sponsored both by Kubota and by Messick's. The production costs of all of this is borne by our two companies and every dollar that's thrown into one of those coffee cans as people are leaving it goes directly to the charities here. There's a couple of ones that we support here locally mennonite disaster service is one that I'm really close to. I've done about a dozen trips with those guys going out to different parts around the country here where we've had hurricane and storm damage and doing construction work in order to repair those homes. Locally here we have an organization in harrisburg and one in lancaster water street and paxton street, very well known big organizations around here that address homelessness in those urban environments and here at our store in Elizabethtown we have Elizabethtown community and outreach which helps people specifically here in kind of an in-between setting. A lot of the services for homeless families and that kind of stuff and people that are struggling with employment and housing are located in those urban environments and echo sitting right here in the middle in elizabethtown is surprisingly busy especially here with all the economic disruption through the pandemic kind of addressing the people that are lost in the gaps in a less urban environment here in etown. So very worthy organizations if you come here to the show, you know we're always blown away by the amount of money that's thrown into those coffee cans $317 000 at this point. I just think it's really important that you know messix is not skimming anything off the top we're not spending your money out here buying christmas lights. Every one of those dollars goes off to do some good so as you come out here keep that in mind as you leave the parking lot.
About half the hours that go into this show are spent in here on the computer sequencing exactly what we haveout there in the parking lot to the music that we've chosen for that year. Somewhere in the neighborhood of about 40 hours goes into doing each three minute song or so and that's really what makes things look cool out here our shows definitely have gotten a lot better as we've spent more time going in and really making things snap and look crisp. We work in tenth of a second intervals so every tenth of a second we're deciding what's happening out there in the parking lot. The computer software here looks a lot like excel you're going to have to go to the computer you have our various what we would call a prop sitting out here going down and a time going across the top and then we're able to go into each one of those props and explain to them what to do. Now the computer understands say what a christmas tree is for example and each one of those lines coming down so we're able to take that entire prop and then apply animations and stuff to it and then the computer translates what that animation looks like out here on the machines.
In just the same way they're going to understand that we've got a line of tractors, what's called a fire stick essentially, and we can go and say hey zip from left to the right and the computer will understand that movement and translate it to the machinery that we have out here in the parking lot. These portions of the show are actually worked out sometime in about july for the most part this is kind of when all the planning for this starts. By that point in the year we've figured out exactly what we're going to set up out here and we create a digital version of it here in the computer so that programming can begin.
So this is our 2021 messick's christmas lights show we hope you'll come out here and check it out the show this year is held at our Elizabethtown location that's where it's set up. We're in the middle right now of transitioning this store down to the Mount Joy store just down the highway. Here next year's show will be down at that location but this year things are going to be held at e-town even though we physically will move in the course of this show operating clearly we're not buttoning all this up and moving it down the road in the middle of all of that. So join us here at e-town this year Mount Joy next year. Messick's is out here for all of your parts and equipment needs if you have parts sales or service needs for any machinery that you've got give us a call we're glad to help available at 800-222-3373 or online at messicks.com.
