Home of England's biggest and greatest web controlled seasonal light show !

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Intro To The Setup: The setup its self changes from year to year, most of the time the display will feature a lot of coloured lights and designs on the front of the house as well as lights and characters on the front garden such as frosty the snow man. Also you will see via webcam 3 my Christmas office, here you will also find a selection of lights and characters that you can turn on and off at any time. You will find me sitting here working, I will also reply to comments on the comments page as well as IM that are sent to the laptop in my office. Sometimes on Christmas eve we will do something different with webcam 3, in previous years we have moved camera 3 to different parts of the house including the tree that lives in our lounge. No guaranties are given on something being different for Christmas eve, but I will be online late into the night and the controls will run all night long and don't actually stop until late Christmas day.

 

History Of The Setup:

 

Controllable light displays have been going since early 2009, but there where a lot of problems with the setup and people being able to actually control lights reliably without downtime was very low.

 

It developed a bit for 2010 when we adapted a better way to broadcast the show and also changing some things with the way the x10 interfaced with the real world. There will still problems though, the show had yet to be automated, it still required me to switch on all the elements at the correct time and then turn them off again at the end of the night, down to this on several times I would forget or something wouldn't initialise when I wanted it to. Also during these times all of the cameras where wireless to prevent me spending time running tons of cat5e around the house.

 

Around Christmas of 2010 we had bug fixed most of the problems, but disaster hit, we had completely underestimated how popular the website was going to be and therefore we ran out of hosting bandwidth very early on during the show and I was unable to get anymore added to my account.

 

2011 was really the first time we had a reliable and strong service, it had all been automated so no human input was required every night to start and stop the show. We had also changed yet again the way we distributed the images and the way the x10 system was networked to website viewers, this worked great large amount of viewers got to control the display and we had very little problems, this was all down to renting a virtual windows server with a large network bandwidth (about 100x more then that of 2010)!

 

2012 wasn't good for me, I was unwell for both Halloween and Christmas, this meant that i didn't have the will to spend hours making sure that everything would work online, I am very sorry for the lack of content for 2012.

 

Now for the present day, we are using a very similar system to that used in 2011, but we have done some upgrade work, for starters all of the servers used to host the show have been upgraded, the server that sits in my office is now a core 2 quad q6600 rather then a Pentium 4, also we have switched from a low power virtual windows server to renting a dedicated Atom windows server, more about this server can be found here. Upgrading both of these servers means that we have a lot more fire power to throw at the show to keep it running smoothly. Also earlier this year my home internet got upgraded from a 5 mbs download adsl to a 40 mbs fibre optic with a great 8 mbs upload ! This has allowed us for the first time to stream 640x480 resolution from all three cameras (the max they all support is 640 x 480). As long as everything goes to plan this year will be one to remember, I am also speaking to as many news outlets as i can to see if they can cover us to help increase out viewer platform.

 

Thanks for taking your time to read all of this and thanks for spending your time with us at Mathlin.co.uk we really appreciate it !

Intro To Christmas: Welcome to the Christmas page on Mathlin.co.uk, here you can find links to the controllable Christmas lights page as well as being able to see pictures from previous years of Christmas fun. You can also find links to my Christmas blog, this is what I will update most of the time on the Christmas pages, it features lots of pictures from the current year of Christmas as well as information regarding changes to the show I am making. You can also find down on this page, countdown timers to the start of the Christmas show and Christmas day its self.