Nutcracker, originally called rgbsb, was written by Sean Meighan in February 2012. Sean, who was new to animated Christmas lights, wanted an easier way of creating effects on smart RGB devices. He came up with the unique concept at the time of defining a model (megatree, matrix, arches, etc.) and then dropping effects (butterfly, spirals, text, .etc.) onto the model. Sean gave a presentation on the newly renamed Nutcracker software at the Texas Academy in the Summer of 2012. People were excited. Nutcracker could produce either lms or Vixen 2 files. Nutcracker 1 and 2 were developed as a web based php application. To create effects users would log into the web applicaton, define models and apply effects.