How the Show Works

Every second of the show starts in a program called xLights — free, open-source software that lets us design and choreograph every single light, one song at a time. Think of it like sheet music, except instead of notes we're placing pixels, and instead of an orchestra we've got roughly 150,000 individual lights waiting for their cue.

Once a sequence is finished in xLights, it gets handed off to something called FPP (short for Falcon Player) — the software that actually runs the show every night, so nobody has to sit at a laptop with a finger hovering over the spacebar. FPP runs on a handful of Raspberry Pis tucked around the property, each one quietly doing its job in the cold so we don't have to.

From there, the signal goes out to a lineup of controllers — the boxes that translate "the software says do this" into "the lights actually do this." Each controller is responsible for a chunk of the display, and there are more of them wired in behind the scenes than most visitors would ever guess.

And to tie it all together with sound, an FM transmitter broadcasts the music straight to your car radio at 91.9 FM — perfectly timed with everything happening outside your windshield.

So how do you actually get to pick a song from your phone? That's thanks to a tool called Remote Falcon — it connects to FPP behind the scenes and lets visitors queue up a request right from the parking lot, without anyone touching a keyboard. Head over to the Jukebox page to see it in action.