RGB Mini Tree Mini Forest Part 1

nutz4lights

nutz4lights

Full time elf
Joined
Dec 12, 2012
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Melbourne, Florida
Hey all,

I have always run mini trees in my display... back in 2006-2008 time frame, that consisted of around a dozen of the 1 meter (3 foot) green wire easels wrapped with a couple hundred white incandescent lights... around 2009, I got a heck of a deal on unlit evergreen-looking mini trees from Target (they were 90% off so I wound up with somewhere around 30 of the 1 meter tall versions and at least 50 of the 60-ish cm (24") versions. I added 300 white incandescent mini lights to the 1 meter versions and around 150 white incandescent lights to the 60cm trees and was very happy with those until last year... last year was my big jump into RGB, adding somewhere around 7000 pixels and probably another 2000 dumb nodes. I didn't have it in my budget to do the 48 mini trees (16 x 1 meter and 32 x 60cm) so I put them out there with their white incandescent lights.... and I hated it so much, they didn't even get programmed into the display. :p I knew with that, that I needed to convert them to RGB this year and elected to go with pixels instead of dumb nodes.

Here is a video showing the 16 x 1 meter trees in the arrangement they will be in (which is at the base of my 6 meter pixel megatree)... I elected to go with just 50 ws2811 pixels on the trees and happy with the outcome. I went with 50 pixels mostly due to the way I want to control all of these. I plan on using 8 outputs from the PixLite16 controller from Advatek to control these 16 trees (2 trees per output)... I plan on controlling the 32 smaller mini trees with the other 8 outputs from the PixLite16 controller (4 trees per output).

https://vimeo.com/102477914

the 32 x 60cm trees are next... first step is stripping all of the old mini lights off...


Enjoy.
 
They look great, just wondering why you are only doing 2 tree's per output when each output could run 6?
Each output can run 340 pixels is all.
 
Definitely a good point. Basically, 16 of the 1 meter trees and 32 of the 60cm trees is what (I feel) looks good in that location of the display. I had to put a controller there and decided to go with the PixLite16 due to the 16 outputs and the fact that I was using 16 and 32 of each tree type (even multiples). I <currently!> don't have anything else to put in that part of the display, which I'm sure will change! The PixLite16 controller will go on the megatree pole with two p12s controllers (they control the 48 megatree strings). I guess I've never been big into pushing controllers to their max.

So there is some logic to my selection, but it is definitely fuzzy logic... ;)
 
A whole lotta zip ties! I started off thinking that we would just use 5 - 10 per tree and ended up putting a zip tie on almost every pixel... Sounds horrible but it only took around 15-20 minutes per tree...
 
The trees look great. The tree-to-tree chases are working wonderfully.
I'm curious if you have tried bottom-to-top or top-to-bottom fills?
 
Thank you for inspiring me :) I ordered my lights for the season from Ray and added lights to make 8 of these.. Now I just need to find some cheaper 36" trees..
 
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