Small Minnow In A Big Ocean - Hello From Michigan

DesignFlaw06

DesignFlaw06

New elf
Joined
Nov 29, 2020
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2
Every year, my wife keeps saying "We need to put up Christmas lights." By "we" she means me. I'm not a fan of ladders or the cold so I decided to go with a permanent install instead. It's not much. There are three ~25ft (~8m) of LED strips. Section 1 is 219 pixels, section 2 is 238 pixels, and section 3 is 221 pixels. It started as just an Arduino board with some custom firmware. That setup wasn't great or reliable. Pixels would flicker or strobe at times. I've since upgraded to a Falcon F48 with a few differential receivers.

For now, it's going to just be the 3 strings of pixels, but more lights are likely in the future. The old setup had just some basic marquee or alternating colors, but because it wasn't as reliable as I would have liked, I didn't play with it much beyond that. I'm hoping the new hardware has fixed it. I had them running 100% white tonight with no issues so I'm hopeful.

I have a Pi that I'm planning to run FPP on. There's not a lot of animation that can be done with just 1 row of horizontal pixels. I may decide to do a sequence to music a little later, but one step at a time. The creativity part doesn't come so easy to me. Any suggestions or ideas are welcome. I have started experimenting with xLights, but I'm not married to it. There's a ton to learn.
 
Welcome! I'm in Michigan as well (West Bloomfield area) and have a small show. Suggestions? Figure out how much time and money you want to devote to this. It's easy to spend a lot of each especially in the first few years of growing your display.
 
Well first, welcome to ACL. Most individuals do begin small and grow their displays over time. For ideas I suggest looking through the ACL Display Videos section. Although the forum archives are mostly problem solving there is creativity posts there as well. Cheers.
 
ezellner said:
Welcome! I'm in Michigan as well (West Bloomfield area) and have a small show. Suggestions? Figure out how much time and money you want to devote to this. It's easy to spend a lot of each especially in the first few years of growing your display.
Click to expand...

I'm on the west side, Muskegon area. I'm going to see what I can get done this year with what I have. Maybe I'll expand if I can impress myself with that I have.
 
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