Hacker News Reader

Comment by sircastor | Hacker News Reader

This is a huge space to get into. I’m on my fourth year doing an outdoor light show.

My personal preference is 12v ws2811 bullet-style voltage-regulated nodes. They’re extendable, individual nodes on a strand are replaceable if you’re willing to do some cutting and crimping.

I like the 12v because you can go for longer strands without losing colors from voltage drop. Regulated over a resistive voltage divider = less heat.

As has been mentioned, you can install WLED onto a microcontroller and have a web-page for a remote control.

View on HN

I'm sure you know but for others reading, 12v ws2811 are grouped in threes, so not individually addressable. 5v is, and when you're working at scale power injection isn't a huge deal as you'll be doing it anyway.

Always standardise your connectors. I'm a fan of the Ray Wu ones.

ESP/WLED driven is my preference, but the Falcon controllers are popular amongst people who are more DIY/woodworking oriented as they're much simpler to set up and not _heaps_ more expensive. Falcon Player/xlights is the standard software for designing/playback of your show regardless of hardware.

Coro props (corrugated plastic, corflute) are a cheap and effective way to stand out from the crowd. Animatronics, smoke etc are also an option when going more advanced.

It's a lot of work. You rarely want to start after October or order your goods after July. You are running a live production and things will go wrong. Good luck to anyone entering the space, it's very fun and expensive!

> I'm sure you know but for others reading, 12v ws2811 are grouped in threes, so not individually addressable. 5v is, and when you're working at scale power injection isn't a huge deal as you'll be doing it anyway.

I haven't found this to be the case. All my lights use WS2811 chips, and are individually addressable. The 12v does have to be regulated down to 5v, but that's happening on the node anyway.

> Coro props (corrugated plastic, corflute) are a cheap and effective way to stand out from the crowd.

I'll add to this that if you have a 3D-Printer, you can do some neat stuff if you're up to designing it. I am in the middle of adding 16" snowflake props to my setup this year. It took a couple of revisions, but I've got them all setup and I'm just finishing the controller to drive them now.

It is a super fun hobby, and as averageRoyalty mentioned - it can be spendy.

There's multiple types. I use the bullet type regulated 12V ws2812 for outdoor applications and they are individually addressed. I also use 12V ws2812 RGBCW (RGB+white cold+white warm) unregulated (resistor) led strips which are grouped in threes for indoor. Both work just fine with wled or custom software (e.g. micropython / C++ ) on esp32.

Oh really? Thank you, I haven't come across individual 12v, I steered away from them originally for that reason. Have you played with GS8208? They seemed a bit too new last year for me to invest, but they look very nice!

I played with WS2812 for a while, but now I have an AlphaPix system from HolidayCoro. My starter kit was ~$500 with 100 lights. They are large C9 bulbs, now permanently installed on the house eaves.

The popular free software, xLights, has a ton of features (and pitfalls). You can export the sequence to Falcon on a RasPi.

I would rather get back to programming my own sequences. That was a lot of fun on Arduino with WS2812.

I know programming but only very rudimentary hardware, how difficult is this to do? Are there guides?

Installing WLED is about as easy as one could hope for - so easy, it's kind of unbelievable. Provided that your device has USB, you plug it in, go to the WLED installer page (https://install.wled.me/) and press the install button.

In terms of making custom sequences for lights, my go to is Xlights - an Open source project that allows you to create layouts, and build sequences.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com