Hello from Florida

Joined
Dec 11, 2020
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My wife had been asking me to put up Christmas lights since we bought the house 3 years ago. She knows that I never do anything halfway so she should have seen this coming! Instead of the traditional incandescent lights, I'm running a Falcon F16V3 from a Raspberry pi. I'm currently at 472 pixels with about 500 more to go. This years objective is to line the roof and outline the windows and garage doors. I'll start looking at more interesting props for next year.

I'm mounting all of my pixels in F-channel, for the eaves, or J-channel, for the windows, that matches the trim on my house. They go up in minutes but it takes hours to construct them. You can see in the picture below the F-channel. The little tab on the side just pops under the flashing on the eaves and I can get 100s of lights up in minutes. I'm just gluing the pixels in place at the moment but I'm considering making it permanent by filling the channel with epoxy after the season. I need to do a little more research on pixel life expectancy first though.



light strips.jpg

Every time I've had an issue or question during this journey this forum came up in the searches and last night when I added a new string that had the wrong colors and some yellow mixed in with the white, this forum once again pointed me in the right direction. Note to self: 9 times out of 10 the problem is the channel settings on the controller!!!

Thanks for the help you guys have already provided and thanks in advance for the help you will provide in the future. I'll get a picture of the lights tonight. Somehow I have been too admiring my work each night to remember to take a picture :)
 
@Florida Christmas, I'm in florida too and just getting into this for the 2021 season. Do you have pics of your F channel and J Channel mounts? I saw a video somewhere that someone else did permanent mount for year round lighting similar. Curious how yours came out and how you managed cabling, segmenting and power injections etc.

I have 70' of front roof and want to do roof outline too.

Some key objectives I'm considering as I start to build is:
1) Daytime appearance (as clean install as possible)
2) Easy install / uninstall (thinking segments)
3) Off season storage (#2 plays into this)


Thanks,
mike
 
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