Gday. I'm a newbie.

N

Nathan F

New elf
Joined
Oct 19, 2015
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1
Gday Guys and Gals.
I had a quick flick through the 101 manual and, I'm not quite sure if I am going to go that full on to be honest. Although you never know what the future will hold.
My wife and I have a large family with young kids. We have recently moved into our new family home and we are going to go a bit crazy with the lights this year. But we are tired of buying lights that are buggered after one season of use.
Please if the people of this forum would be kind enough to point us in the right direction of where we can get our hands on good quality lighting, that would be a great start for us and we would be thankful.


Cheers


Nathan
 
Welcome to ACL Nathan,


Is your intent to also do sequencing etc to animated lighting ? Most of us are DIY , but you do get Minleon lights (I dont have any) , that are good quality and also have programmers with built in effects
 
G'day Nathan,
As Gerry said most of the lights on here are DIY which involve time effort and yes failures.

I am personally changing my display to minleon 1. because I'm limited for time at Christmas, 2. Because they are extremely reliable and 3. Because they are not DIY I can get insurance on them for my installation business.

Saying that for a DIY option Ray wu's pixels have been good in the past for me.
 
Welcome to ACL

A little bit of DIY knowledge and soldering skills should come in handy even if you don't want computer control. I have cheap store-bought light sets that were from the end-of-season sales in 2008 and they still work fine because I fixed the issues as they appeared.

Generally the LEDs in sockets don't last as long as the ones in heatshrink. Clear cables discolour in the sun too.

I also agree that the lights from Ray Wu are reasonable. I can only speak for the strips in silicone tubing for two seasons though. I'll never buy a ropelight again because the strips are so much better and they are repairable. If you don't want computer control then dumb RGB is a good choice and you can re-choose what colour you want it to be each season. If you're going for computer control then you should consider pixels because you can individually control the colour and brightness of individual lights. You'd need a pixel tester (about $3) to use pixels in a display without computer control. This cycles through several patterns with the RGB lights and I think it looks nice enough.

I wouldn't aim for computer control this season if I were you; it requires a lot of research, effort and planning but it was worth it for me. If you want to convert to computer control in future then make sure any light set with an 8 function controller has at least three wires going to the lights.

So far I have found that although they don't have much range, the lights at Coles have been good. Recheck the number of wires though because this can change from one year to the next.

Once I know more about what you're trying to do then I'll be able to give more specific suggestions.
 
welcome49.png
 
Welcome to ACL Nathan. I know what you mean about the store purchased lights.


Mm
 
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