We got all of the remaining lights up last weekend, including our flat-tree (which I guess we can’t really call a “mega tree” since it isn’t freestanding). I spent the week chasing down problems/bugs in xLights and FPP, along with controller, cabling, and bad pixel issues. I finally got everything working yesterday (Friday). Fortunately I took a week off to mess with this stuff.

I’m hoping to post more build information, stats, etc. and some videos once we are ready to go with a full show. We are still tweaking sequences and testing things.

Wireless has pretty-much utterly failed me. I am still using it for the power relays and sparkleballs, but had to abandon it for the Peace/pixel stakes as they were apparently putting it over the edge. As soon as I added them- they, and the sparkleballs, only worked about 60% of the time. It is REALLY not practical to wire up the sparkleballs to the controller, at least not right now. I can’t figure out how some folks can run entire shows via wireless. I’m in an xLights Wireless support group- and most of us have given up on it, although some insist they are running big shows with 10s of thousands of pixels exclusively on wireless.

We aren’t planning to add any more pixels. We still have inflatables, blow-molds, “twig”/wire art, and other decorations to hang and put out, but they are a bit more subtle. Most will probably go in the side or back yard. We live on a corner lot- so much of the back of the house and the side yard are visible too. The original plan was to put most of the conventional decorations there, but we are pretty burned-out right now just dealing with the pixels.

We are running most of our pixels at 10%, which is still pretty amazingly bright. It’s as low as they will go to still display colors fairly accurately though. Really-really hoping not to be a burden on the neighborhood once things get going.

I set up a twitter account for feedback on the light show:
@oakhillslights