In order to set up a good crazy blinky flashy Christmas display, you need to have some kicking software.  That’s where XLights comes in. There are many commercial software packages out there (I’ve spent way too much on them in the past), but this open-source software is the best by far.  That’s due to dedicated hobbyists that are willing to donate their time to make the world a little brighter. With the right skill set, you can also be helping *world-wide* for Christmas lights. 

And literally world-wide…. just check this video out – you’ll see our display on the top left around 0:48.  Pretty awesome to have been part of this…

So, back to the actual program at hand.  As I mentioned, this is open-source. There’s an active community that you can engage with at http://xlights.org

What is XLights?

An excellent question! It’s basically a way to simulate your display virtually before you even buy the first bulb. It takes a view of your own house, overlays lights where you want them to, and incorporates music to make the magic happen.

This software will then create files that get imported into your Falcon Pi Player, which talks to the Falcon controllers to turn on and off the lights in the right sequence. And all for free!

You can download the latest software at http://xlights.org/releases/.  There are updates continuously, so your best bet is simply to grab the latest. Install like any other program (Windows doesn’t like this program, so you may have to click on the “More Info” link and click “run anyway”). 

The next step is to define a location where all of your files will be stored. For me, I had a separate directory for every year of my display (since I added new elements and controllers all the time!). Since you’ll be downloading the information from my display, I would also recommend that to be in its own directory.

Here’s an example of my file structure as a reference. I use my Google Drive to save my files, but this could simply be a folder on your hard drive. I recommend to create an XLights folder, and then create sub-folders for each year of your display. If you download samples from other displays, create a separate directory for each them as well – this keeps everything tidy!

In the continued sharing philosophy of XLights, I’m also sharing all of the songs and sequences from our 2019 display. You can download files for my display here (zipped file). Extract these files into a new folder under your Xlights folder (I’m using the COFS folder, for Christmas on Front Street!).

Once you have extracted all the files, your COFS folder should look like this:

Now, let’s open the XLights program! Again, this is NOT intended to tell you how to use this software. There are many great videos and wikis on the Xlights page. The goal here is to give you enough to be dangerous and interested enough to continue learning.

If you want to learn more, it looks like they’ve put everything in a very convenient location in the XLights program – definitely take advantage of these links!

When opening Xlights for the first time, you will see a section that says “Show Directory”. You would want to set this to your yearly show directory. If you’ve downloaded our files to a COFS folder, you would want to change the directory to that folder. Once you do that, you may see a prompt similar to below. This is just making sure too save where you are in your current directory. Go ahead and say “Yes”.

If this was successful, you should see a bit more information on that main page. You may have noticed you’re on the “Setup” tab. This helps define what network types you’re using. We used all E1.31 networks. Other controllers may use different setups.

This tab tells you what controllers were being used in my display. I used a total of 8 Falcon F16 controllers that ran the RGB lights. This setup also identifies the specific channel addresses that are assigned to each of the controllers.

The next tab is the Layout tab. This is where it gets fun!