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Ask HN: What are the best programmable holiday lights?

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Re: Ask HN: What are the best programmable holiday lights?

#101

Post by wiether »

binary_slinger wrote: post #65
beala wrote: post #63

This is a tangent, but I feel like we can't talk about LED christmas lights without linking to this video by tech connections: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBFPJ3_6ZWs the tl;dw is that most color LED lights work by emitting a single frequency of light. Compared to classic christmas lights, which are incandescent filaments filtered through dyed glass, the LED lights look a bit... radioactive. My personal pet peeve…

> My personal pet peeve are white LED lights. If you're not careful to buy the ones labeled "warm" they look cold, and imo, not very festive and inviting. I completely agree. This is true also for all household LED lighting. I prefer cold for kitchen food prep areas and bathrooms, but warm everywhere else.

Warm light in the morning make me sleepy, while cold light in the evening make me... uncomfortable.

I solved the issue with the "Natural light" scene from Philips HUE. Not only it manages the temperature for you during the day, but also the intensity.

It only requires the "White Ambiance" lightbulds, cheaper than the "Color" ones.

Re: Ask HN: What are the best programmable holiday lights?

#103

Post by function_seven »

Tepix wrote: post #23

Maybe i can piggyback onto this question: Are there timer switches that can change the times depending on the calendar? I want to turn on some lights shortly after sunset but they don't have a brightness sensor. So i'd like to do it by time of day.

If you don't want to go full-blown Home Assistant or anything "smart", you can still handle this with a self-contained switch.

I installed a Honeywell similar to this one [1]. You tell it the date and your lat/long, and it knows the times for dawn and dusk.

I had a previous version of it 10 years ago [2]. Worked great.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004AP92N2/

[2] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004SOZHXY/

Re: Ask HN: What are the best programmable holiday lights?

#104

Post by shaftway »

entangledqubit wrote: post #27

I ended up buying a couple strings of Twinkly lights a while back - after considering a diy solution. The mobile app has been solid and (assuming they didn't muck it up) there's are libraries out there for interfacing to them as well (over WiFi). The cost is not cheap but seems fair to me and seems to be well built. (The light mapping is pretty fun. You can zigzag a bunch of lights across a wall and basically create…

Another +1. I've found that it takes a lot of scans to get a solid representation of the tree, but I love the way they show you the quality of the scan (LEDs with well known positions are green, poorly are red, and mid is yellow). I think I had to do about 30 scans to get all of the lights I cared about, but I also put lights deep into the tree.

I wish there was a bit more customization. Particularly around the flashing effect. Also, oddly, the color settings are HSV, but they don't give you the V, so you can't get a clean grey color. I wanted dim white lights with sparkle flashes, but I haven't been able to make that happen.

Re: Ask HN: What are the best programmable holiday lights?

#105

Post by pbasista »

tiagod wrote: post #28
sircastor wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that you can install the WLED firmware _from the website_ is the cherry on top. It’s a fantastic piece of software.

Agreed. There's people on HN complaining about APIs like Web USB, but I never got why. You can ship a firmware flasher as a single .html file now! No sketchy native tools or messing around with the command line, and runs on pretty much any machine.

> complaining about APIs like Web USB, but I never got why

I think that these people are not complaining about the API itself, which might be well-designed. The problem is, in my opinion, elsewhere.

It seems to me that the main reason for criticism is that having a browser perform operations on your USB port or on your Bluetooth is potentially dangerous, if you do not know what you are doing.

At the same time, the target audience of these APIs is typically the people who cannot be bothered to or are unable to use a command line tool. So, in a way, by having these APIs in the browser, a potentially dangerous tool is being put into the hands of people who may not be capable of realizing how dangerous it actually is.

I think it is fair to note that some people often do not review the scripts they download before running them, either. They just trust the source. Which might be a good-enough approach in some cases. From that point of view, having the browser run a script from a trusted website and operating a USB device is similarly safe. Or similarly unsafe.

But with a browser having this kind of capability, there are other threat models. If a scammer wants to read the user's USB devices and look for something to exploit, they can either ask the user nicely to run their probing script. Which, for better or worse, many people that may be prone to this kind of attack, would just be unable to do.

Or, an attacker might simply use the browser's API to do the same thing. And they may even present a nice guide to the user explaining how to allow it to run. It seems to me that there is more people who would be prone to falling for this kind of trick than there is people who may be tricked into and capable of running a script.

Re: Ask HN: What are the best programmable holiday lights?

#106

Post by tannedNerd »

jason_pomerleau wrote: post #14
havnagiggle wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is Govee the down-cone style? Or are there also others doing that? There's been a couple of houses that have this and I wasn't sure what they are using, but it's the only one that I would consider doing whole house exterior. Many others look too sharp.

Yes, though they have other types too. We’ve been thrilled with ours. I’ve never done Christmas lights because I don’t do ladders, so having a permanent fixture is attractive. Plus we can use them on big holidays too. I have big reservations about ‘smart home’ stuff, and it’s only the second such device in our house. But I’m clearly losing that battle, and will be looking into some ways to mitigate the privacy concer…

I have them on a separate vlan that my iPhone can see. They can only see other govee devices and my iPhone so not super worried.

Re: Ask HN: What are the best programmable holiday lights?

#107

Post by FarmerPotato »

averageRoyalty wrote: post #44
sircastor wrote: post #17

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…

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…

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.

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