Lunar Den Lights is a technical blog primarily covering RGB "Pixel"-based holiday light shows. It provides a backstage view of our current light show: Oak Hills Lights. You will also find some 3D printing information, as we use some 3D printed components in our light show, and that is one of my other hobbies. This..
Enclosure Temperature Control
During our 2022 lighting season, from Thanksgiving to New Years, the outside temperature ranged from -6℉ to 70℉. When I built a new projector enclosure, I had to build it with four (!) cooling fans/vents, three on the sides and one on the top, so I could keep the temperature inside the enclosure under 100℉..
Oak Hills Lights 2022 Stats
This year, we had... 19,540 pixels (individual lights able to display millions of colors) consisting of: 11,860 LED pixel module "bulbs". 7680 LED pixels in 15 "P10" sign matrix panels. A projected matrix of 57,600 virtual pixels. Oak Hills Lights - Controllers 2022 We used 12 controllers (Tune-To sign controller is not shown above) and 12 differential receivers (remote controllers), running..
xLights Around the World
This is our third year participating, and this year's video is out now! In previous years the displays have been random, but this year they sorted them by country, state, and city. We are at 2:48, along with a pretty good turnout from MO!
Arctic “Bomb Cyclone”
Most of North America has struggled late this week, just before Christmas, with record cold temperatures. Like much of the country, we saw rapid temperature drops, snow, and high winds as the storm line passed us. On Dec. 22nd, 2022 we went from 43℉ into the single digits in a matter of hours, and had..
Oak Hills Lights 2022 Walkthrough
Instead of a long video with me droning on-and-on, I though I would do a walkthrough in pictures this year... Unfortunately things don't look quite as nice in daylight... We do have some more-conventional decorations on the porch and in front of the house. Our light show starts with the Show Runner computer, which is..
Oak Hills Lights 2022 Controllers
I thought I would share the controller diagram for our show this year. Hopefully it will give you a bit of an idea of what goes into something like this hardware-wise. This is a large PDF that you can download if you would like, otherwise it scrolls in the box below... Oak-Hills-LIghts-2022-ControllersDownload This just shows..
Show Control Panel
I mentioned this here and thought I would write up some quick information about it. This isn't really a complete build document, but it may give you some ideas you can use for your own show. Last year I used a scrolling P10 display inside the house to display our show's status. It wasn't very..
New-ish P10 Tune-To Sign
Just a quick build, adapted from some older ones... For cars parked down the street/hill from the front of the house, waiting in line, they can see most of the lights, but can't see our long Info Matrix under the carport, which has tune-to, song, and show information. Main Info Matrix Kim asked me to..
Mega Tree Wiring
I've received some inquiries from social media about why I pulled the fuses out of my K16A-B controller for our megatree and how it is wired. First, some background... This year we had planned on going from 2" spacing on the megatree strips to 1" spacing. Going from 75 pixels per strip to 150. We..
Is 5v really dangerous?
Quick safety lecture... Pixel light shows like ours run on either 5v or 12v DC. Because this isn't "scary" mains AC voltage (110-120vac in the US), some folks don't think it is dangerous. Well, here is the thing: Electrical current is measured in Amps. An amp is an amp, regardless of the voltage. It takes..
Projector Enclosure (2022)
I salvaged a projector that was damaged with a cracked case, and an exploded lamp assembly. It took a while and several bandaids to get all of the broken glass out of it, and then some super glue and a new lamp assembly and it is almost as good as new. Fortunately most of the..
Small Battles
First, sorry about the lack of build info this year. We've been very-very busy with life and just trying to get our show set up. I know at this point I owe everyone the completion of the Mega-Starburst. We expanded the Megatree and added a Mid/Maxitree as-well this year, otherwise not a lot of new..
Free-Standing Video Screen
In past years we have used a PVC frame with a frosted shower curtain on one of our windows for rear and front projection. This worked okay, but the PVC bent easily, so the frame wasn't quite square, and the adhesive hooks we used to hold it to the brick and soffit didn't hold very..