New Christmas Lightshow Setup for 2022 with xLights and Video Projectors

Neil from Messick’s here to show you our 2022 Christmas Light show. We are a tractor company, an equipment company. Most of the time we're out here on YouTube talking to you about tractors, machinery equipment. Locally, here, we do a big charity Christmas Light show every year, and it's cool. You usually see a couple of videos shared on our YouTube channel about it. This last year, we moved our primary headquarters location to a new store here in Mount Joy. That required us to completely rework from the ground up our Christmas Light show. We're going to take a walk around this show here today and show you all of the new technology that has changed this year.
The biggest challenge in moving the show from Elizabethtown to Mount Joy is the structure of our building. You may not look at it this way, but if you think of the old building there, it had a showroom on the front with a bunch of interesting peaked roof lines. We could do things like wash the building with colored floodlights and put lights down the roof lines of those buildings. Here at Mount Joy, we now have a very typical commercial warehouse looking construction to this facility. That leaves us with not a whole lot more than a gigantic blank wall in order to try to make a Christmas Light show against. It's not very interesting. There are two things that we did here to address that problem.
One of them are these huge trees that you see here behind me. These trees are 33 feet tall for the big ones and 21 feet tall for the small ones. Each one has about 5,000 individual pixels on it is several thousand feet worth of heavy-duty lighting strips in order to keep all of that together. That creates a pixel panel, a matrix, if you will, that we can run animations and stuff across to make cool-looking effects for the show. The trees were just one way that we addressed our gigantic gray wall. While the trees create a little bit of a foreground for us against this big wall, we're using the wall itself is a gigantic video screen. We have three large video projectors that allow us to create a screen about 150-foot-wide behind the show.
Mark, here. The man behind the camera for all of these videos goes through and crafts a video sequence that goes along with the music and tells the story of the light show as it goes. There are four different songs in this show, each having a very different vibe to it, a very different video presentation that goes along with this show that adds a new dynamic element to the light show. I think It's super cool. Being that this is a charity thing, we're lucky enough to get support from other businesses that are around, and one of those here donated these video projectors to us. These are 22,000-lumen video projectors somewhere in the neighborhood of about 10 times the amount of light output that you'd have for a normal video projector in say a conference room.
They take a huge electrical circuit in order to run them. The video input on these is run by what's called a raspberry pie. A $35 credit card size computer takes care of running the video sequence into the back of each one of these projectors and a time lock with one another to make sure that the video sequence in these individual little computers don't drift off of the timing of the rest of the show. It's amazing technology. Some cool software developers have made some awesome stuff for a $35 computer that runs the show. One of the things that makes this whole thing possible is the support of other people that come alongside of us in order to make this happen.
You look at some of this stuff and you think, my goodness, did money have to be spent to pull this off. It is a costly thing, mostly in terms of labor though. These big trees, we only have literally about $125 wrapped up in the construction of the tree mostly in metal poles. The base of it here was donated to us by Schwarr Concrete. They're a company that makes concrete septic tanks. For a period of time at the end of the day after they had made a septic tank, the remainder of concrete for the day was dumped into the bottom of a small container, and over time, they built up for us these 4,000-pound concrete bases to support these trees on a windy day.
The one thing that makes our show unique is the fact that we integrate the products that we sell, tractors primarily, into the show. Over the years, we usually are going to have 30 to 35 different machines, tractors, mid-size tractors, excavators, skid steers, utility vehicles, zero turn mowers, all worked into this show and turning their headlights on it off in a lot of cases. It's a unique way for us to bring what we do into a Christmas Light show. However, right now inventory shortages are super common across our industry. This is about all that we could scrape together for this year but in order to be able to fill out enough stuff out here on the ground this year, we made a tomato cage Christmas tree.
These little trees, which we have 32 of them made, are simply tomato cages turned upside down, and then have lights wrapped around them to make a very economically priced prop that we could turn on and off to create some cool run effects during the show. Things only need to look good in the dark. When you look at this tractor right here, this looks like a mess during the day. We go through, when we build these props, we try to build them in a way that we can recycle them from year to year. Build things that we can come out, put on the machines, hook up and be done with, and move on. It can be a big-time saver for us in constructing all of this. We have these metal frames here made out of rebar that support these lights and hook onto the back of the tires. This hood shape here of the tractor made out of just simple two-by-fours. This was a bigger tractor last year, but in the dark, you're never going to know the difference. It all like runs together. These lights right here have a cool look to them. They're called neons, LED neons. There's a strip of LED lights that runs through the inside of this plastic tubing and when those lights turn on, the tubing will diffuse that light and make it look like a neon strip.
They're gorgeous. They look cool on the equipment. I would not recommend anybody buy them because they are way too fragile and way too expensive for the amount of time that we've been able to get out of them. Unfortunately, I got enough around to get another year out of these before we're going to have to move on to something else a little bit more durable. A staple of most Christmas Light shows is the leaping arch. Oftentimes an eight-foot piece of PVC pipe bent into a little curve with multis segment, Christmas lights across it, in order to make an arch effect that you can run animations on. For us though, we take quite the nearest thing that we have making an arch. Two excavators to make a big, curved arch.
Each one of these has eight programmable segments across it, creating 16 channels for us to be able to run a smooth leaping arch animation across. For the technical among you, the nerdy set like myself, probably a little curious of what the computer side of all of this looks like. In redesigning the show for this year, we changed the platform that all of this runs on. We would've used a very consumer-centric product called Light-O-Rama for the last nine years that we've been doing light shows changing here this year and introducing those video projectors required us to switch to a different software package. We're now running one called xLights.
Specifically, xLights allows us to have these multiple video outputs all synchronized together, something that our older software package wouldn't handle very well. It also has better support for a lot of these large trees and large layouts of pixels. It's allows us to address the entire show at one time and apply an effect to all of this stuff at one shot in the software will interpret exactly what that looks like outside here. As this show has grown, switching to this other software package has created something that we can program a lot easier. The show itself does run off of another raspberry pie.
You go through and build the sequence here on the computer. You can visualize what your show is going to look like, and at the end, you render out that data stream and save it onto, again, that $35 raspberry pie that runs the show. Most of the data that's on this is either a little bit of DMX at this point that comes out delivered over ethernet into a DMX adapter, or most of these controllers will run, I believe it's E1.31. It's a DMX-over-ethernet protocol that has been way more reliable for us than the older serial protocols run over top of ethernet cable that our older controllers would've used. Being that this is more of a star topology instead of a continuous line that runs through all of our controllers has been way more reliable than the systems that we've used in the past.
The audio output on that Raspberry Pie is plugged over into an FM transmitter. When you come through and see the show, you can park your car, tune your radio and stay in your car in order to hear that audio for the show. We've also added, this year, an option to get out of your car and sit in some bleachers out here to watch as well. We have some speakers outside to help give audio to an outdoor audience. About 150 hours of time in the construction of this show every year is spent here on the computer.
What we do is set up a mockup here in the software of what we think the show is going to look like. Then start writing the show in about August. Then we go through and use this mockup to construct the show outside that we've had here on the computer, in our brain. Now, at this point, now we've taken what we actually built, loaded it in the computer, and then arranged the props in the right places in the simulator here, so that when we do big effects across this entire show like the spin, the computer understands exactly where each of those props are at and renders out the effects properly. Using this simulation software, we can go through and create these shows in the summertime while everybody's sitting around the pool, we’re listening to Christmas music, every year.
Part of building these shows is constructing them in a way that you can set them up quickly and efficiently. One of the ways that we've been able to do that is by putting work lights up here on the roll bar of these tractors. Now, you think of Christmas lights as being traditional AC lights. There's DC controllers available as well. That is what we have used in order to turn on headlights and taillights on the tractors. Now, we didn't do that this year for time sake, but we have been able to recycle these work lights up here for the last three years now.
These were donated to us by the folks at Artillian, and so at the end of the year we can cable all this up roll everything up, stick it in the box, and we're ready to set up for the next year. Get it out, plug it in, zip-tie the work lights right up onto the roll bar, and away we go. About 90 minutes or so, we can set up this portion of the show by thinking ahead on making these things reusable.
That's a little bit on the Christmas lights show. This whole thing is a bit of a blessing and a curse in a way. We enjoy doing this. There's a whole team of us. Mark, myself, my two brothers, Kevin and Lucas, two guys from our parts department have been out here for hours. Lynn and Tyler, thank you for helping us get all of this stuff together. In total this year, there's probably about 600 hours' worth of time in getting all of this put together.
Now, that's a lot of time, that's a lot of investment. However, over the last nine years, $360,000 has been raised for local charities in our area by doing these shows. There's no cost to come, if you'd like to come check it out locally, you just come rolling in here in our parking lot throughout the month of December. When you leave, we'll have a coffee can there at the exit, asking for your donations to support the charities that help families in our local community here.
Little bit of a burden for us, you put the time in, it's a ton of work, you'd like to move on. At the end of all that, we've done something great for our community and have a show that we're proud of this year. Glad to be able to do that and come out and enjoy it. If you're shopping for a piece of equipment and we can help, or if you've got parts of service needs for a machine you've already got, give us a call at Messick's. We're available at (800) 222-3373. We're online, messick’s.com.