Dec 25, 2012 By Deana Carpenter 3 min read

Intrigued by holiday light shows timed to music, 17-year-old Matt Ennis of Bethel Park decided to create his own this year at his home on Pleasant Street.

The Bethel Park High School senior said he is “really into Christmas” and also wants to become an electrical engineer, so designing his own light show was something he wanted to attempt. The idea for the light show came after he received a microcontroller for Christmas last year.

Matt’s mom, Lisa Ennis, said that he started working on his show shortly after Christmas last year.

“It’s the first year I’ve done something so big,” Ennis said. He said he’s seen other light shows and knew that there was a system that could be purchased to design one, but he wanted to do it on his own.

“Any high schooler could plug something in,” Ennis said. “A lot of it was actually programming.” It took him nearly an entire year to design and program the light show to four Christmas songs by the Trans Siberian Orchestra.

He used a software program called Vixen to program the songs and to set timers for his light show, and worked on it after school in the family room of his house. “I kind of commandeered that room,” he joked. The teen designed and built a circuit board with robotic controls that are able to communicate with his computer., and the project runs on regular 110 Volt electrical outlets.

While programming the show and working on the circuit board took several months, the process of decorating took just a few days. A week before Thanksgiving when Ennis was off school for a couple days, he and his grandpa started decorating the outside of the house. He was finished putting up the decorations by the end of Thanksgiving weekend.

The light show is so far the only large engineering project he’s done, although he said he’s “fixed just about everything” around the house. He said that he’s also happy about finishing the project joking, “For every 100 projects I start, I finish one or two.”

Ennis is delighted about how the project turned out, and said he will probably keep it going every year — he has plans for an even larger light show.

The light show at his house on Pleasant Street in Bethel Park runs from 5:30 p.m. to 10 p.m. nightly until Jan. 5. Ennis said that if anyone has questions or comments to email him at ennislightshow2012@yahoo.com.