Join for quick access. Enter your email below and we'll send confirmation plus sign you up to our newsletter.
By submitting your information, you confirm you are aged 16 or over,
have read our
Privacy Policy
and agree to the
Terms & Conditions. Geographical rules apply.
Stay On the Cutting Edge: Get the Tom's Hardware Newsletter
Get Tom's Hardware's best news and in-depth reviews, straight to your inbox.
You are now subscribed
Your newsletter sign-up was successful
Join the club
Get full access to premium articles, exclusive features and a growing list of member rewards.
An account already exists for this email address, please log in.
Raspberry Pi powers impressive Halloween haunted house light show
We've seen some impressive Christmas lights displays over the years but this is hands down the coolest Halloween light show we've ever seen. This project is incredible and shared to us by a user known as G8HCB over at YouTube. In a recently uploaded video, they put on a show with their huge display of Halloween lights operated by none other than our favorite SBC—the Raspberry Pi.
According to the video, this display is set up over at their friend's house in Manchester, United Kingdom. But we still have plenty of details that explain how it works and what they're using to pull it all together. The video isn't much of a tutorial but rather a demo of the light show in action. The footage was captured with a drone so we get a good look at all of the lights which cover the yard and entire front of the house.
The decorations consist of several components that all work together harmoniously to music. There are a handful of arches across the front of the yard alongside a few spooky tombstones. A few pumpkins are lined up by the front door with animated mouths that sing along to the songs that play. The side of the house features bats, spiders, ghosts and even the Ghostbusters logo (and yes, the Ghostbusters theme has been programmed into the show). There's even a smoke machine that goes off during certain parts of the show.
According to G8HCB, everything you see in the video was made completely from scratch. The lights and templates were created just for the project which also includes the pixel display. All together the project uses over 25,000 individual LEDs. Unfortunately, we're not sure exactly what model of Raspberry Pi is used to power everything but looking around the XLights community, it seems that the Raspberry Pi 4 is a popular choice.
The software handling the LED show is the aforementioned Xlights—an open source tool that makes it easy to program custom light displays using DMX (commonly used in the film and theater industries) and E1.31 Ethernet controllers. . G8HCB confirmed in the video description that all of the lights were manually programmed and synchronized for the final result we see in the video. This was no doubt a tedious process but the end results are more than worth it.
If you want to see this Raspberry Pi project in action (and trust us, you do), you can check out the full show over at YouTube.
Stay On the Cutting Edge: Get the Tom's Hardware Newsletter
Get Tom's Hardware's best news and in-depth reviews, straight to your inbox.
Ash Hill is a contributing writer for Tom's Hardware with a wealth of experience in the hobby electronics, 3D printing and PCs. She manages the Pi projects of the month and much of our daily Raspberry Pi reporting while also finding the best coupons and deals on all tech.
