Small Minnow In A Big Ocean - Hello From Michigan

[DesignFlaw06]

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.

 

[ezellner]

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.

 

[TerryK]

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.

 

[DesignFlaw06]

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.

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.