I'll bet this could be done in LabVIEW!

[Bryan]

http://members.cox.net/transam57/lights.wmv

[didierj]

...the ultimate way to beat your neighbours with the christmas light!

...maybe overworked?

...electricity bill still too small?

...or a serious inferiority complex!

[Mike Ashe]

This is called, "Wizards of Winter" thats the song, and if you google on that phrase you'll find that it is now posted in dozens of places. Very popular.

Could this be done in LabVIEW? Using IMAQ vision I don't see why not, if you want to take the time to write a video editing tool in LabVIEW, but you can buy one for $50.00 or use Windows MovieMaker for free on XP.

[Bryan]

This is called, "Wizards of Winter" thats the song, and if you google on that phrase you'll find that it is now posted in dozens of places. Very popular.

Could this be done in LabVIEW? Using IMAQ vision I don't see why not, if you want to take the time to write a video editing tool in LabVIEW, but you can buy one for $50.00 or use Windows MovieMaker for free on XP.

I meant using DAQ hardware to control various circuits of lights and sync them to a song.

The guy is a GE engineer I hear who got some module to synchronize various outputs to music. He did an awesome job.

Apparently, his electric bill is $100 higher/month when he's running this setup (estimation based on last year's, where he did something similar with a little fewer lights).

[Megavolt]

I saw this video earlier and started with the concept of using MIDI. I would open a MIDI file, look at the notes, and send notes to Windows media player (MIDI module) while turning on/off channels in a DIO card. After some research it seems that very little work has been done in LabVIEW with MIDI and the interface to Windows Media player is not very supportive to MIDI interface. I will continue working on opening and parsing a MIDI file in LabVIEW. My only thought at the moment is to send MIDI commands to an external instrument.

If anybody else has ideas it would be great to hear them as the first thing people at work asked when they saw the video was "Hey can you do that in LabVIEW?"

[AnalogKid2DigitalMan]

I think MIDI would be the way to go too, that's what hit me when I first saw it. Gives the most flexibity. Granted, you could do the whole thing with a PIC or a plain old PLC. Just fire outputs with the appropriate length and delay. But that could get tedious, I'd much rather be outside throwing snowballs at cars

On a related note regarding "Virtual Instruments", check out animusic.com.

These guys designed virtual music instruments that respond to midi commands. They then compose the music to animate the instruments. This is the opposite of what many people think (the masses just think they made a computer graphic video that goes to the music).

[m3nth]

I can't follow the video link but I'm guessing I've seen it before judging by what's been said. The article below has more information on the guy that did it (and a photo)

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,177861,00.html