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 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..
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..
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..
K16 Mega Tree Controller Rebuild
This year we were going to expand our Mega Tree to 150px x 32, but fell back to 75px x 32 for, reasons. In any case- I need to use all 16 pixel ports for the tree now, with two strands per port. In preparation for doubling the vertical resolution in the future, and to..
Building the Megatree Starburst, Part 1
Late last year I discussed a different Megatree topper with Kim and told her about this cool Starburst (or firework) effect you can build using these: Affiliate Link: She bought me THREE of them for Christmas, and wants one in this year's show. My plan is to build one with 2' PVC spines so we..
2021 Behind the Scenes Video
Here is a behind-the-scenes walk-thru of our 2021 show/layout. Obviously completely unscripted with me babbling semi-coherently. 😁 https://youtu.be/m_rzh7nM-fw I'm hoping to get time to post more details about the mega-tree and some of the other builds. It's just been a busy few months. Here is a pic of the K16 controller box that is under..
2022 Layout and Test
Update: We did have to scale this back. Hopefully we will be able to upgrade things more in 2023. While it's subject to change, I thought I would share our current layout plans for 2022... Highlights: Mega Tree moved to right side of the yard. Our real oak tree was blocking the view of it..
Oak Hills Lights Power Consumption
Okay, the numbers are in... From Thanksgiving Day through New Year's Day we used a whopping 92.19 kWh of electricity. At $.12/kWh that's a total of $11.06! We did have a Raspberry Pi controller (Show Runner) and a small network switch running on separate (un-switched/monitored) power. Given the maximum wattage of the power supplies running..