As this is an electrical build, please read this! UPDATE (9/11/2021):Of course I couldn’t leave well enough alone. I wasn’t happy with the way the cover on the first DIN rail box I bought distorted the displays on the power monitors, and I wasn’t comfortable with the whole SSR setup […]
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This is primarily what I started all of this for. The Wife wants a “Griswold House”, and why just staple lights to the roof when you can do SO MUCH MORE!
Colorlight Controller Box Builds
Last week I posted about my P10 Column Build. One big problem I had was the Pi-P10 controllers I tried to use just didn’t work. They had a terrible amount of flicker, and I was unable to find any actual support for them. So- my next most expensive option was […]
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Raspberry Pi 5v Power Regulation
We have a lot of Raspberry Pis that run various elements of our shows, and powering them from “wall warts” in enclosures isn’t always practical, especially since we are already running 5v power everywhere. The problem is- if you power them using the GPIO header, there is absolutely no internal […]
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Column Matrix Builds
Last year, we lit up two of our three front porch columns with PVC pixel “poles”. These worked really well: Pixel Columns This year we are making several changes. First, we got rid of the flat-tree in the middle of the front of the porch, so I needed to light […]
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Add an OLED to a Raspberry Pi
It’s kind of silly since they spend most of their time closed up in a weathertight box, but I really like the little OLED screens on the Kulp controllers. They give me a quick indication if the controller is working, so I can at least rule it out (for the […]
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Info Matrix (2021)
Last year we did a “Tune In” Matrix under our carport roof. It was my first DIY matrix, which actually turned out and worked pretty well after going through three revisions. It was functional, but just didn’t fit in well with the rest of our display and I wanted something […]
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2021 Mega Tree
I’m going to step through this process as we work on it, so this is a build-in-progress, which probably won’t be done until Fall. So far, it’s just in the planning stages, and we have the first part of it: We also have Boscoyo strips and pixels for it, but […]
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G.E. Hattitude Quartet
Meet the biggest single prop we’ve bought to date: The Gilbert Engineering Hattitude Quartet! This thing is almost 4′ in diameter, and consists of a wreath/spinner and close to a dozen singing face options (with or without Santa hat). We wanted a new “centerpiece” above the porch, to take the […]
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FrankenPower Mk. III
FrankenPower Mark I-II used mechanical relays that were connected to conventional outlets. They were bulky, probably not very safe, and had to be placed in a tote to try to keep them protected from the weather. One of the original mechanical relays failed almost immediately upon use. Mark III uses […]
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2020 Show Post-Mortem and 2021 Plans
Well, it’s mid-January and things are still getting organized and packed up as we plan for this year’s show. The roof outlines won’t be coming down until the weather improves, but almost everything else is either hung up somewhere or crammed into a tote for storage. We even already got […]
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5v vs. 12v Pixels
This is one of the most divisive arguments you will find online among folks in the Pixel hobby, perhaps more-so than where to buy your pixels and what connectors you “HAVE” to use. Here is my take on it… First- this is all my opinion. I will very likely take […]
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Star Stake Quick Build
We’ve already started working on some things for next year… We found these metal stars at Hobby Lobby over the weekend. We already had a couple-dozen of these “Quick Light Post” metal light pole/stake things from Menards. They sell them every Christmas, but they never seem to show up online. […]
Continue readingCh-Ch-Changes…
So, I think I’ve made it through a big learning curve with regard to Master and Remote FPP setups, and controllers in-general… First I found out that the Kulp K16A-B controller is fantastic as a stand-alone controller, or as a Remote, but NOT as a Master. For some reason it […]
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Up and Running!
Oak Hills Lights officially started on Saturday night, Nov. 28th! It’s been an uphill battle the last couple of weeks, as I noted in my previous post. The problems have primarily been syncing issues, scheduler issues, and problems with our WiFi SparkleBalls. Our display is running now through Jan. 3rd. […]
Continue readingUpdate. Frustration!
Okay, so to get a few things out of the way… The Redneck Matrix Mark II was fairly quickly replaced with Redneck Matrix Mark III. I needed more resolution to make text more readable, since I’m using it for tune-in and song information. I didn’t do a build post for […]
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Vankyo Projector Power Control
I posted earlier about the dirt-cheap Vankyo projectors that some people use for their displays (for rear or front projection). These things are about as cheap as you can get for reasonable quality. One problem with them is there is no way to control the power without either physically pressing […]
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Cheap Rear Projection
A few of the sequences I downloaded/purchased this year actually have video files. I also wanted to try out a Virtual Matrix, since it just wasn’t going to be practical to build a large enough one this year for what I wanted to do. So- I decided to try a […]
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MAX485 Differential Transceivers
I was digging into how Differential Receivers for LED lighting systems work, and was told about these MAX485 Transceivers on one of the forums: These little boards cost around $1 each, and can be used to extend a WS2811 (Pixel) data signal for hundreds of feet (probably close to 1000 […]
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Mega-Tree (-ish?)
Well, sort-of. There is some debate over what actually constitutes a “Mega-Tree” in size and construction. I’ve been calling it a Mega-Tree, but technically it is a “flat tree”. So my wife started working on musical sequences and was skimming YouTube for inspiration. She found a display she REALLY liked, […]
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JST Connectors
UPDATE: I revised my thinking on this after realizing I was dead-wrong about xConnect connectors. See it here. This started out as a side-note for my Pixel Data Cables story. I decided it needed it’s own write-up… I’ve seen a lot of hate for these online, usually from people who […]
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Pixel Data Cables
I’ve seen a lot of debate about this, and of course everyone does things differently. I just wanted to show what I am doing for my cables this year. So- you have a fancy new controller, like a Kulp K16A-B: You stick it in a box with power supplies, terminal […]
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Roofline Update
The weekend before last I posted that we had started working on the rooflines. (It’s happening…) Well, besides all of the strips being too long, which caused installation and configuration issues, I discovered that WiFi was woefully inadequate for it. Unfortunately because of my design- I had controllers on both […]
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It’s happening…
Quick gallery post. We started putting the light strips up on the roof… They are actually all up, but I need to perform surgery on several and I only have power/power-injection wired to 2/3s of them. Ran out of time last weekend, and the weather isn’t cooperating this week. Unfortunately […]
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New Kulp K16A-B Controller!
My wife gave me an early birthday/Christmas present this year. I’ve run into a number of problems using NodeMCUs exclusively to run my light display. I blogged previously about Multicast Hell, and there are issues running more than about a dozen NodeMCUs via WiFi, regardless of how you do it. […]
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Pixel Columns
My house has three columns on the front porch, and I decided to light them up with pixels this year. My original plan was to use pixel strips, but the strips themselves have been backordered and I wasn’t able to figure out a good way of mounting them, so I […]
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