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Behind the tree. (Patreon)

Published:
2021-01-05 23:26:54
Edited:
2021-01-06 19:23:12
Imported:
2026-06

Content

UPDATE! I have fixed the tree to display names with some punctuation marks and characters which were causing it to crash. If your video was affected you will be emailed a new link. You can also watch the second behind-the-scenes video of me fixing the problem: https://youtu.be/rGGmofoy88E

I have finished filming hundreds of videos of your names being displayed on my 500-LED christmas tree!

I'm about to start emailing them out, so you should get the link to your unique video in the next 12 hours or so. In the mean time you can see the unnecessarily in-depth behind-the-scenes video of how I made these videos. A meta-video, if you will.

Files

How I displayed hundreds of names on my 500-LED tree.

I promised I would display the names of all my patreons supporters's names in my tree in the video: "I wired my tree with 500 LED lights and calculated their 3D coordinates." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvlpIojusBE This is how I did it. You can ask me question etc over on this patreon post: https://www.patreon.com/posts/45862331/ If you are a patreon supporter from December 2020 and are wondering where your video is: don't worry, it is on its way. You will receive an email with a link sometime on the 5 or 6 January 2021.

Comments

Matt Fisher

I have mine and it is awesome. Thanks Matt. I'm going to see if I can recut it to "maths refit" my favorite anagram of my name.

Adam Keyte

Excellent video, although of course Stretchy is now the true star of the franchise.

Ben

I can't wait for my 17.2MB! Cheers Matt :)

Ben

So did he just send you the same one again hmm

Matt Parker

Happy anagramming! Or should I say: Graphing mayan map!

Matt Parker

Stretchy is now insisting on scale pay.

Daniel Luke

Matt you absolute madman!

Peggy Youell

I bet you are going to think twice about customizing next year's Patron thanks note. :)

Ben

And now I feel privileged to have .41 MB above the average!

Virak Ngauv (edited)

Comment edits

2026-09-08 08:00 Happy to support!
2021-01-06 01:16

Zachary Corya

Was going to do just a month, but I love your videos so I'll stay subbed for the foreseeable future.

Mustafa Barodawala

this is awesome! also please tell stretchy we absolutely love them!!!!

Geoff Lankow

You really ought to do a bit of maths before making promises like this one.

Timon S. Gutleb

And now with this variant of the full alphabet released to the public, people will cut Matt's tree to say funny meme stuff. 😅

Jörn Räuber

Great idea and engineering! I don't want to complain (it's a gift and so it should be taken as it comes : ), but I think my video stopped after the very first letter "J" and showed that for about 5 sec. Next letter would have been "Ö", maybe the german umlaut killed it somehow? Though I think I saw an "Ö" in the spread sheet. As I said, no complain, but I am curious what has happened. Thanks a lot anyway, really enjoy your vids, Matt!

Jörn Räuber

BTW, I am a software developer and first thing I thought when I read about you doing these videos: "Will my umlaute work?" (No kidding...) Thinking about it, I have a rough guess what might have happened. You created capital "Ä" and "Ö", but maybe the function you use to convert the names to capital letters did not capitalise them (or capitalise them differently). Well, just a guess, could be something completely different too, could even be totally unrelated to the "Ö". : )

Andy Clarke

Thanks Matt. Happy New Year! Give your thumbs a well earned rest!

Benjamen Johnson

Awesome thank you! It took me a few watches to even understand what I was seeing. Then it just snapped into place and I saw it.

The Dean

I speculate that he was clean shaven when he started recording the individual videos.

Keith Moser

Awesome being the scene look! While I’m not colorblind, thank you for thinking about that and adjusting the lights to accommodate those who are! You are amazing!

MarkM

Thank you so much! Just received mine, and it's fantastic. Also watched the making of video, and I thought it was odd that you were going to such great lengths to prove that you were really doing each one individually, rigorously even. And then I laughed. Very meta. Thanks for the proof.

Tristan Lostroh

Can I ask what lights you ended up using? I had a strong desire to buy some and "cover" my garden with them.

Mason Lorenz

Thanks, really cool project!

Aki

Seeing the Thank you lined up to the music was neat ^.^

Anders Öhrt

I had the same issue as Jörn, since I also have a "hostile" character in my name. It breaks systems often, on a Ryan air flight a long time ago they could not find name in the list. So I told them to check the last line and there I was. "Anders {hrt". =)

symmetrik

I also really appreciate the big effort and my own personal video! Just for the record: It might indeed be a problem with the Umlaut, because my name also ended with a long H, which is just the abbreviation of my last name, so I'm fine ;) Thanks, Matt!

Przemek Zdunek

Great job. Signed-up while watching the Xmas tree 🎄 lights video. Hope to stay for longer

Rok Pušnik

mine ended up being "PUUUUU" so it's not just the Umlaut

Seppo Syrjänen

Maybe there's a different firmware needed for full Unicode support for a Christmas tree? Or Python on the Pi just wanting to interpret everything as UTF-8 and refusing to put those binary values to the tree controller. Now that's a sentence I've never thought I would write. We live in magnificent times! 

SonOfSofaman

Brilliant! I love it. Thank you so much Matt!

Rik Boss

love it, didn't really expect a video since I've only been supporting you a short while, but I'll take it

Simon Donkers

Thanks, just received my video while watching the making off, merry belated christmas :-). You sitting so still in the video ofcourse supports the theory you just glue each letter together with an elaborate making off. I think you need to do a happy dance next year while playing each letter to be more convinncing ;-).

Antonín Maloň

I've got just "ANTON" as well :). But thanks for the video! And hi Stretchie <3!

Jānis Elmeris

06:01 This turned out to be another version of the "Bobby Droptable" case. :D

Austin Heller

Thanks for the video! I hope you had a great holiday.

xje4

Confirming. Also got only the first four letters before the umlaut.

Jörn Räuber

Yes, ASCII is more than 50 years old now and unicode exists for some decades already, but special characters still cause a lot of trouble. No matter, if you are a software developer or just a normal person with some non-ASCII stuff in your name. : D

Matt Parker

I try to be the bonkers I want to see in the world.

Matt Parker

I should, but my regret fades over time whereas my ambition increases. They will cross over in about June.

Matt Parker

Sitting next to it: it’s downright dazzling.

Matt Parker

Thanks! Much appreciated but do whatever works for you.

Matt Parker

I will pass this on when Stretchy next graces us with their presence.

Matt Parker

Ha. I did have a rough estimate but this was definitely at the extreme upper end.

Matt Parker

Thanks for the big reports everyone! Yes, seems some characters broke the system. I’m fixing it as we speak. Update to follow!

Matt Parker

My thumbs are resting now but they are always on-call.

Matt Parker

Good to hear it worked! I was worried some names might be too quick/unclear.

Matt Parker

Clean shaven and with a full head of hair.

Matt Parker

Glad you enjoyed the behind the scenes tour. Yes, with accessibility I find that a bit of effort makes a big difference to a few people.

Matt Parker

I always think: if I supported me, what would I want to see? And then I do that.

Matt Parker

Glad you enjoyed it! I wish I had done it years ago now.

Matt Parker

That ended up being much easier to do than I had expected.

Matt Parker

That’s amazing. I’m working now to make my tree code “better than Ryan Air”, which feels like the minimum standard.

Matt Parker

I did consider moving in each video but quickly realised that was a bad idea.

Matt Parker

Thanks! I had a great holiday; most of it based around this tree. I hope you had a great time as well.

Robert Watkins

And now the answer to the question of the population of the set representing how many people would put addressable led strings on. Christmas tree, write code to drive them, then spend hours using the construction to thank people: one Matt Parker.

Jörn Räuber

@Matt So sorry for making this wonderful gift to be even more work now. Although, it's not my fault, you can blame my parents for those funny dots. : D

Matt Parker

Yeah, I left the brackets in and that broke the communication between my laptop and the Raspberry Pi. Bracket-free version to follow!

Anders Öhrt

I'm a software developer and has done a lot of work on string handling. Alphabets are horrible sometimes, for instance in the Czech alphabet "c" is one letter and "ch" is another. Yes, a two glyph letter, where one of the glyphs is the same as another letter. Also, in Swedish we have 3 extra letters, Å Ä and Ö. They sort at the end of our alphabet. Other languages often sort letters with diacritics before or after the base letter. Total mess. =)

xje4

@Jörn Well, you could've avoided the second umlaut by choosing a more... honest job back then when the surnames were assigned :P *looks at own surname* Oh, well...

xje4

Let's just redefine a byte to be 32 bit so everything is like UTF-32 and every Unicode char fits into a single byte.

Frans Wilbrink

Thank you for the hours of work you put into this! I won't even mention that the 'W' was displayed a bit poorly and I had to rewind to see what letter it was ;) Glad to support your work!

Frans Wilbrink

P.s. @25:06 I think this is where you hit my name based on your body position :)

Jörn Räuber

@Max That would be great. We can go on with ASCII again, just add all special chars, asian letters and emojis to the table. : D Only hardware producers won't like it. They will probably do it like ISPs then and use bits instead of bytes for advertising. "New smartphone has 32 Gbits of RAM!"

Anders Öhrt

@Jörn Software developers won't like it either, since all their code would break. And users would not like it, because all their text documents suddenly got 4x bigger. But except for hardware, software and users, good idea. ;)

Keith Moser

It’s something that is so easy to forget but makes all the difference to a few!

Matt Parker

Yeah, it seems “W” stands for “wide letter”.

Peggy Youell

Thanks for this bit of fun! It is funny with all the repeating letters in my name. Peggy Youell looked like PegYouel instead. I guess that's what I get for redundancy.

Matt Parker

Yes, I realised the ‘double-letter problem’ when testing on “MATT” and my redundant T. But I could not find a way to fix it which wasn’t too stroboscopic.

Christian Broß

Dear Matt. I really appreciate your project to honor your supporters. I’ve joined a few months ago and really love your work. I enjoy being one of your patreons. With this project, you have increased my motivation to support you in the future and I will stay your Patreon for sure! And, I am looking forward to your future videos. One other thing I’d like to mention is that I especially liked your analysis of the USA election „stories“ and how you brought their claims to a factual level by really thinking through the logic and maths precisely without bias. Bottom line: Let me say a huge PERSONAL THANK YOU for your personalized video to me!

Christian Broß

And not to forget: thank you for your Christmas card, too! Very joyful!

Arnim Sommer

Oh, come on, this is language not mathematics! If the T was redundandt, we couldn't distinguish you from e.g. a door-mat!

Mik Scheper

I probably signed up for your Patreon too late to be part of this, but that's okay. I don't know how I overlooked signing up before, but I'm glad I am now. Love your work, Matt. All the best for 2021.

Hans Josephsen

Saw the update, should have named myself `' | sudo rm -rf / #` or something :)

Antonín Maloň

Thank you so much for the fix! I even got the sipping Matt, yay! And do update us on Stretchie, please :).

Parrik

Thanks for the lots of effort for us all!

Topottsel

I love your deication Matt! Worth noting in your code that double (and presumably triple etc) letters don't swap colours. So with HELLO the L's look a bit static, makes it look like the first L goes on for twice as long and the second L never appears. You can see this if you tested the word HELLLLLLLO. You would see just one L showing for about 3 and a bit seconds, rather than swapping over colours for each L. Definitly NOT worth rerecording a bunch of names but just an interesting quirk =]

Matthew Najmon

The yellow-magenta thing looks like one of those colorblindness tests, and apparently there's a form of colorblindness the other tests I've taken didn't catch, because I was able to pass all those, but I can't make out a single letter here; it just looks like the pattern shifted slightly, but not into anything recognizable as a letter. Edit: just got to the end of the video, and saw you accounted for colorblindness, so whatever's keeping me from seeing it apparently isn't that, or at least not any common form of it.

Seppo Syrjänen

Thanks for the unicode compliant video and especially the even more behind the scenes video! ♡

xje4

Yeah, little bobby tables would've actually worked. And we even got passwordless sudo! But since this is GNU rm, it needs to be `sudo rm -rf --no-preserve-root /`

xje4

Just to see that Matt doesn't own a MacBook but instead the much better MattBook was worth watching the video

Jochen Römling

Thank you! I was part of the affected and I have received my updated video. I thought the original was behaving strangely, but I wasn't going to bother you about it because it is the thought that counts and you put in the effort!

Nick Stallman

Yeah I'm a bit the same. I'm not colour blind but I do have an eye condition which for this I presume makes me more sensitive to the intensity than the colour so similar intensity looks the same.

Florian Linscheid

Thanks for all the effort! I would support you anyway, but actions like these just make it a bit more rewarding still. Any chance we see some of the guest code running on the tree? Some honorable mentions?

Nick Stallman

The better solution for the characters in the ssh command would be to give subprocess.Popen an array of the command elements instead of trying to build a single string. That way Python handles all the escaping and ensures everything goes through the way that is expected.

Levi

I should have registered a longer Name :ugly: but never the less, I love it!

Thecommexokid

I sent him a project but he hasn’t replied to me about it yet. I’m guessing he’s been enjoying the holidays and then trying to get these Patreon thank-you videos done first! I wonder if he considered how long into January he’d have to keep his tree up when he formulated all these plans…

Richard Dickins

Awesome Video Matt, it's always great to see how people do the things they do, and the reasoning behind it. Very much appreciated! Stay Safe!

xje4

That would definitely make the call more robust (and take away a whole area of security problems), however on the Pi all arguments are thrown into a shell which has to parse it into separate args again. So it wouldn't solve all problems.

Joel

I commented on the video, but I feel here is the proper place to engage in the discussion. Running "complex remote commands" over SSH is something I do regularly... When using Python to do it (as you have) I'm prefer to rely on the "pipes.quote" function. Also, subprocess.Popen accepts a list for the command (as well as a string), and it handles quoting arguments with whitespace (saving you an extra quote run). E.g. >>> from pipes import quote >>> from subprocess import PIPE, Popen >>> cmd_remote = ["sudo", "python3", "Python/xmaslights-LETTERS.py", send_name, str(start_time)] >>> cmd_local = ["ssh", f"pi@{pi_IP}", " ".join(quote(a) for a in cmd_remote)] >>> process = Popen(cmd_local, shell=True, stdout=PIPE, stderr=PIPE)

Jörn Räuber

Got the new video, thank you so much, Matt! Love how you point to the "Ä" (at least it looks like you were doing so). I'll keep both videos. : )

Matthew Najmon

In my case, I don't know of anything like you describe with the intensities, though I have had instances before where I discovered colors were appearing different to me than to others, even others who are from the same culture and have the same native language and dialect (which I was surprised to learn, matters a lot for how you see colors). As in, color A looks very different than B to me, but nearly indistinguishable from C, while to everyone else, color A is nearly indistinguishable from B, but looks very different from C. Edit: on further deliberation, I don't think that's what's causing the problem for me, either, as I can very clearly see two very different colors of lights present, just can't see the letters within the patterns of those two colors (and pattern recognition is usually a strong suit for me). Nor is it just that the patterns aren't very clear in the way they're being displayed, or else there'd be a LOT more people having the problem than there apparently are.

Matthew Najmon

Got the one for my name, finally (gmail flagged it as "promotions", and stuck it somewhere that took a while to find). It does a little better. Still not clear, but after a few rounds of stepping through it with pause, I was able to make out about half of the letters. Oddly, the last name was much easier (could make out more of the letters) than the first, even though they have a lot of the same letters, and neither has any of the especially problematic ones (like umlauts).

Arnim Sommer

writing things to temporary files, sftping over and using them?

GwynBleidD

Thanks a lot Matt! I was drinking my tea from my utilities mug when I've clicked play on my video and what a surprise! You were holding it too :) What a coincidence indeed, who would've known that will happen, it's like I saw you recording those videos or something beforehand and decided to make myself a drink in that mug in case my video was recorded when you held that mug, but how could that happen? As for unicode stuff, for anyone interested: in unicode there are special modifiers that adds the dots, dashes etc to other letters to make for example a from ą (fun fact, this exact modifier is called "ogonek", which is the only non english name for modifier in the whole unicode table), but there are also letters in the unicode table, being just straight the letter you want. That's why you can encode them in 2 different ways. And this exact feature is very often used when it's needed to replace all non ascii letters with their closest ascii approximation, you just convert all the letters to the first representation (with modifiers) and strip the modifiers out. Too bad there is one polish letter Ł that doesn't have version with modifier, so most of the tools doing that conversion just gets rid of it instead...

Arnim Sommer

Fiddling with ideas... I was thinking about a fibonacci tree, where the branches are equidistant, but their length progresses with the fibonacci sequence, and (of course) have a number of lights according to their length. (In reality that tree would have an angle of 122.5° between branches...) Then I added up how many lights my tree would have and came to an off-by-one fibonacci number of lights. So, up to the question: do I live with a fibonacci tree having an fibonacci number minus one number of lights, or do I add one extra light? If so: where to put it?

Frank Gevaerts

I think a large part of it is just the tree and the way the lights are distributed.

Vincent Zalzal

Thank you Matt for that "making of" video, it was genuinely interesting! Being a software developer myself, I have an idea of the possibly inordinate amount of time you had to spend also on coding all those scripts and looking up all those APIs... Quite the project! And I have to say, you've got to be the most patient person I "know". You like giving yourself those kinds of challenge, don't you? I remember when you computed π by throwing a lot of dice, or when you trained matchboxes to play tic-tac-toe, or when you flipped coins until you got 10 flips in a row, or put dominoes down to create a computer... I really love what you do, I hope you'll continue having fun on YouTube, and I wish you the best for 2021.

Bret Scofield

I'm always a fan of absurdity and silliness, with a touch of science or logic or engineering. Thanks again!

Paavo Saarinen

My name in lights on the tree was wonderfully underwhelming. I really quite like it lol

Merlin Magnus

You can tell how far down the list your name is by how lifeless Matt's face is. I can tell by mine that he was reconsidering that this might not have been such a "bright" idea. Alex got chipper matt, I (Merlin) got zombie Matt, Zach just got Matt twitching on the floor.

Norman Rasmussen

It would have been quicker and easier to just enable ssh's ControlMaster. That way the connection is persistent and later ssh invocations can re-use it without having to re-authenticate.

Norman Rasmussen

btw, I transcoded the file to mp4 using an online converter and it was only 8.6MB. Doing it locally with `ffmpeg -i $name.avi -c:v libx264 $name.mp4` resulted in a 3.3MB file. The quality of the various files isn't visibly different (to me on quick inspection).

Reed Bowman

I'm not colorblind in any way, but most of the letters were totally illegible, both on my video and on this one. Bit of a Parker Square, in the end. Sorry Matt.

Jaap van Muijden

I showed my girlfriend, and to my parents. No one even tried to fake interest. :D Excellent, loved it! Thanks Matt!

Stephen Pritchard

Hi, just joined your patreon after following you for a while. Going to experiment with the Christmas tree lights this year!