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I haven't seen any discussion of this sort on these forums, and so I decided to make an effortpost as a way to put out feelers and see if anyone else is already into the hobby, and potentially even lure one or two others into giving it a shot this year. There's a lot of overlap with other hobbies including home automation, 3d printing, in-home LED lighting, and tinkering with SBCs. With that said, here's a (hopefully informative) infodump! What do you mean by holiday lighting? Not so much talking about Clark Griswold style strings of incandescent lights blanketing your house, or the giant wire frame decorations with like 3 frames of animation that your local park might set up over the holidays. The new hotness is pixels. You've probably seen Youtube videos like this before: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-jgRxzLlhY You can make that happen! Though definitely on a much smaller scale, at least to start out. I will mostly be focusing on light shows synchronized to music, or lighting effects that aren't part of a pre-programmed show but are visually interesting. The common thread here is individually addressable LED lights. The decreasing costs of these LEDs and the controllers needed to run them are why this hobby has really taken off over the past 10 years or so. Ok, but why are we talking about Christmas stuff now? Well, the reality is that if you want to put together a light show in time for the winter holidays, you probably need to at least start pre-planning in the summer. This is a specialty hobby, and a lot of the equipment you'll need is manufactured in China, and either made to order for you (typically via a few storefronts on AliExpress), or purchased in bulk by a few of the retailers within the US. Some of the other supplies are manufactured in the US, but typically by smaller companies which don't warehouse a ton of stock and tend to sell out once you get close to Christmas. Also, these aren't just for Christmas. Many people run a smaller Halloween show before transitioning to a bigger Christmas show in November. So you need to plan early! So what do you need to get started? I do not intend to get into the weeds with specific brands, although I may add that information later if anyone wants some recommendations. The most basic equipment needed to run some blinky flashy lights includes: LEDs - The lights themselves. These can be either LED strips or (more commonly for outdoor use) strings of pixels. These specifically need to be individually addressable pixels, not so-called "dumb" LEDs. Typically the pixel protocol starts with WS28xx (WS2811 is the most common). You can buy either 5v or 12v pixels. 12v are better for running long strings with lots of lights, but use more energy (although energy costs shouldn't be much of a factor until you get to thousands and thousands of lights). The pixel strings will come with pigtails attached in order to connect to a controller or string together multiple strings of lights. xConnect is what you want for waterproof outdoor connections. If you're just buying lights for indoor use it doesn't matter as much. Controllers - This is the biggest determinant of what exactly you will be using the lights for. The most basic controller is just a single board controller like a Raspberry Pi or ESP32! The pixels have 3 wires, one for positive current, one for data, and one neutral. You can simply solder or use a dupont jumper wire to attach the data and neutral to the board. You will also need a power supply (or multiple power supplies) to provide the 5v or 12v DC current that the lights and controller need. However there are other things to account for such as fuses and level shifting, which is why there are a good variety of purpose-built pixel controllers that will take care of all the electrical engineering and basically make things plug and play for you. You can buy the components yourself and wire things up (similar to building your own PC), or buy a prebuilt controller. Software - Are you preprogramming a sequence to music? You need xLights. It's free, open source, and frequently updated. Has everything you need. The sequences can be streamed from your PC to the controllers as the show plays, or moved to an SD card on compatible controllers. Do you just want to make colorful patterns, maybe setting them up ahead of time so they can rotate through a few specific effects? You want to use WLED. This is free, open source firmware that requires an ESP-based controller. Great web-based interface that lets you change effects on the fly with your phone. And if you want to expand to full xLights shows in the future, your WLED controller can run those as well (with the caveat that the sequence can't be stored locally, and must be streamed from a PC or more purpose-built pixel controller). (Optional) Props - Maybe you're just stringing your lights along the outlines of your house. Totally valid! But if you want to mix things up, you might look into either buying premade props to push pixels into, repurposing some holiday decoration with new flashy lights, or building your own prop! Common props include shapes like snowflakes and candy canes or big trees made out of multiple strings of lights (called Mega trees). (Optional) Audio equipment - If you've got a music show, people need to hear the music. You can do this with some speakers (probably will annoy your neighbors if you're planning on doing this more than once), or, more commonly, a radio transmitter. Plug it into your pixel controller or PC with xLights, find an unused frequency for your city, and away you go. Additional resources and more info If anyone's interested I would love to add more info or answer any questions. If you're just looking to learn a bit more from other sources, there are tons of Youtube videos on WLED or xLights setups. There's also a podcast called What's Happening in Christmas Lighting that's a good primer on the subject. Dark Knight fucked around with this message at 11:59 on Jun 10, 2023 |
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