My 500-LED xmas tree got into Harvard.

Matt is the embodiment of the motto "Why spend hours to fix it manually, when you can spend a year coding it."

"In theory, it cannot go wrong" The biggest clue that Matt is a mathematician and not a programmer. Bugs are the single constant in the universe.

That patent notice was way more reasonable than I expected. Sounds like they're not saying you specifically infringed any patents, just that anyone who wants to maybe sell something that does this should be aware that whatever method they come up with /might/ be patented and /might/ get them into trouble. Still kinda silly to patent a method of measuring stuff, but again I was expecting some kind of patent troll, not a fairly 'innocuous' message.

Love that this is Matt's idea of real world application of Pythagorean theorem as if this is something everyone does.

instead of using the brightest pixel, use a base image, then look for the greatest increase in brightness, that would likely reduce the number of 'bad' pixel positions found.

Matt: "it's not super obvious that they are out of sync with this effect" Me, who's been unable to take their eyes off that one contradictory LED in the middle since the start of the video: "oh good" :') Needless to say I am very happy that the video was all about addressing this issue! Looking forward to seeing what everyone can come up with this year! :D

Oh no! I've just realised this video is a year old, and there's no follow-up video running the submissions on the new tree :( No pressure Matt, but I still hope to see this again some day.

For my own tree, I photographed in a dark room of course - but I made each LED light up pure blue, then had my code look for the reddest group of pixels. This worked out pretty well since the LED was bright enough to show up as white on the camera (So with a large red (and green) component), while all the reflections elsewhere were mostly blue (With small red components). I like your error correction technique and will definitely incorporate it into my own code - I'll happily convert to the GIFT format as well. I have mixed feelings on swapping to pre-rendered shows in CSV format: It's a great way to fix the compatibility issues you ran into with the code submitted last year, but it also means any particular CSV will only work completely as intended on the tree it was designed for. LibreOffice also can't display more than 1024 columns, while your tree requires 1501 - something I'm not sure counts as an issue since these will be programmatically generated anyways, but I'll bet someone out there (Without Excel) would have tried making one with spreadsheet formulas, especially considering this is the premier spreadsheet appreciation channel on YouTube.

Let me get this straight. The 'Organization' has developed a technology (for finding lights in 3D space or for turning them on) so incredibly good and magical and difficult, that if a few people were inspired to try their hand at the same thing, they might independently, accidentally arrive at that same, brilliant, patent-worthy solution?

When Matt turns on the colors for the wires in the graph, I was confused for a moment because everything was the same color until he said that they were red and green. Very fitting for a Christmas tree ;) curse my genes for not letting me enjoy this color combination. The idea for moving the out of bounds points was really interesting

Longest gift I've ever waited for was the followup video to this.

That legal document sounds like, we love your work, but we have patents vaguely related to this that we would be legally required to defend, so keep being awesome, just remind everyone to check existing patents so no one has to waste money on lawyers. Nicest legal document I've ever seen

10:02 Matt is giving off some big "You get a kid a present, and all they want to do is play with the box" energy

Patent law (in the US) requires that the technology is non-obvious to someone in the associated industry. If picking the brightest pixel and using its position for the coordinates is not obvious, I don't know what is.

I'm so happy for your tree! mine got low grades, failed a bunch of classes, and hated being in school; he stays at Walmart during the holidays. Glad to see your tree has grown into the giant it is today!

Inspired by this last year, I made my own, but being frustrated by the slowness of scanning, I was able to (nearly) triple the speed by setting 3 consecutive LEDs in each of Red, Green and Blue, so I was effectively scanning for 3 LED's at a time by finding the brightest point in each colour, rather than doing each individually.

I feel like the check using the brightest pixel might also be a fault with false positives from reflections. Perhaps each image needs to be compared with an all-off image, then you can subtract and select pixels with the greatest difference.

"You can already see we've definitely got a Christmas tree." Me, being red-green colorblind: So we meet again...

Really hope the follow up video happens at some point.

Where is the video of running the new animations ?