Difference between revisions of "XLights"

• The developers and authors of this manual/wiki are volunteers.
• A very special thanks goes out to our families for supporting us in this hobby. Without your support we could not do this.
• A very special thanks goes out to Matt Brown and Sean Meighan, the original authors of xLights and Nutcracker.

• Xlights was created in 2010 by Matt Brown. Matt, a LOR user, wanted a show player that would have low system requirements and high performance.

The original xLights was “only” a scheduler/player. It had sophisticated playlists, ability to play videos, mp3 and wav files. Matt created a process to support Renard, Pixelnet, E1.31 (Sacn), LOR, DMX and Open DMX controllers

• There was a built in CONVERT tab to change LOR lms files into xLight XSEQ files.
• Xlights has been a reliable player used by hundreds of Christmas Light enthusiasts

• Nutcracker V1.0 was written by Sean Meighan in 2012.
• Sean, who was new to Christmas Lights, wanted an easier way of creating effects on smart RGB devices.
• Sean came up with the concept of defining a model (Megatree, matrix, arches, .etc.) and then dropping effects (butterfly, spirals, text, .etc.) onto the model.
• Nutcracker 1.0 and 2.0 were developed as a web application. To create effects you would log into the web, define models, and drop effects.

• In January 2013, Matt Brown took the web based code that Sean had written and re-wrote into C++ and made Nutcracker part of xLights.
• It produced a real time Nutcracker product.
• Example:
  • The snowflake effect took 5 minutes to generate effects using Nutcracker 2 minutes
  • In Nutcracker 3 (The xLights port), that same effect now took less than 5 seconds.

• In January 2015, a group of courageous men took on the task to develop the next evolution of xLights/Nutcraker.
• Sean had discussions with Dave Pitts about making a horizontal timeline, sound file waveform and drop effects.
• Dave coded up the first Alpha xLights/Nutcracker 4.0 in November 2014.
• In January 2015, Gil Jones and Dan Kulp came on to the team and took over the development from Dave. Dave went back to hardware design on his new Falcon 16 v2 boards.

• Audacity timings have been incorporated into the platform. For those who wish to add and create timings manually, please see below.
  • Free Audio Editor and Recorder (Windows)
  • Free Audio Editor and Recorder (Mac)
  • Audacity Wiki
  • Audacity Online Manual
  • Timing Tools (add-ins)