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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?

#111

Post by josefresco »

oigursh wrote: post #110
josefresco wrote: post #108

We've been happy with our Twinkly lights (after several years). Not really "DIY" but you can create your own light scheme/shows. https://twinkly.com

Returning my black Friday set. The app is a split-brained and buggy.

Weird. We don't ask much of it, but it's worked pretty well for I think 3 seasons now. The app was not impressive, but did work. The "remapping" of lights can be a little wonky, but each time my kids were able to complete the task.

The only nitpick I have is it's paired to only one phone, so we pick one person in our family to "manage" the lights.

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

#112

Post by BHSPitMonkey »

sowbug wrote: post #96
xattt wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The missing middle appears to be tree lights that have a traditional appearance (and don’t look like robot spaghetti). Adhesive LED light strips are meant to be only indirectly visible.

These are a good stand-in: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005002906547500.html They are strip lights, but the light is mostly omnidirectional, and the strip material is flexible. If you want a dark-colored strip, which looks better on a dark-green tree, here's a non-BTF option: https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256805412113378.html

I've had a set of these (purchased from Amazon) deployed since October and we've been happy with them. The outdoor strand is run by a QuinLED Dig-Uno board and has stood up to a lot of rain so far. The wires at the end are just flush cut short with the conductors showing, so I made some attempt to weatherproof that spot just in case.

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

#113

Post by kd5bjo »

SoftTalker wrote: post #41

White, non-blinking lights are the only acceptable holiday lights. All others are exceedingly tacky and should be banned.

My parents have always gone for an absolutely huge number of white mini-lights on the tree. So many that they have to be plugged into a dimmer circuit so that the intensity isn’t blinding.

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

#114

Post by leptons »

ThrowawayTestr wrote: post #90
leptons wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WLED is nice for 1-dimensional LED strips, or if you don't really care how the animations project on your LEDs, but anything in 2 dimension is painful, the grid mapping in 2D is just overly complicated and obscure. I barely got my simple LED matrix working and I've been doing LED grids with my own software for over 10 years (so I know how easy it can be). WLED was just an awful experience for 2D led arrays or anythin…

Have you used it recently? The matrix configurator is much improved.

Yes I have used it recently. WLED is a joke for anything other than 1-dimensional arrays. It's the way the pixels are addressed and mapped in 2 dimensions that is the problem with WLED. It's especially difficult if your "grid" is anything but an exact square or rectangle, with skipped pixels, or multiple mapped areas, etc. I found it all to be extremely frustrating and a badly designed system. I tried WLED to see what the fuss was all about, and I was not at all impressed. I have my own LED mapping system that works with 1-D, 2-D, and 3-D pixel mapped arrays, with arbitrarily placed pixels being simple to work with. Of course this is not what WLED was designed to do, and it shows. The 2-D mapping in WLED seems like a bolted-on hack.

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

#115

Post by jerich »

chris_overseas wrote: post #59

A lot of people here are recommending WLED for the controller, but I would suggest you look at the Pixelblaze [1] instead. I've used both in a bunch of different projects and strongly prefer Pixelblaze over WLED. Some reasons why: - It has a much more intuitive user interface - It's far easier to program new patterns. Programming is done in-browser with a language that's a subset of Javascript, with code changes bein…

This gets such a huge thumbs up that I had to scroll up and reread it to make sure this wasn’t my own post from a revived thread from last year!

I’ve been using a pixelblaze with a long string of cheap 2812 LEDs on my Christmas tree for three years now with tons of compliments from neighbors.

I’m an embedded software guy, and every year I mean to dig in and try roll my own, or do something clever with an RP2040 board (also a shoutout for the Pimoroni Plasma), but the demands of life and “get the light show started” mean I keep using the Pixelblaze.

I even upgraded to their newer versions last year, and used some of the smaller ones to make some LED tutus for my girls that synced pattern with the tree (the tutus were synced with each other for a Christmas show, but it was trivial to then add the tree for fun afterwards).

The mapping is huge for the wow factor, and the pixelblaze makes it so much easier to get something fast and good enough.

There’s so many community-shared patterns to choose from, and it’s been easy to make small modifications to look better once mapped to a tree, though most work as-is.

My project I won’t get done this year is to try to make some calibration patterns and use ChatGPT to analyze some photos/videos to make a 3-D map, but I’ll realistically probably end up with the vaguely-triangular 2-D map again; I can get it done in about 30 minutes now.

The following is a couple years ago. I think last year I was up to 1100 LEDs and the mapping was a bit better, but I didn’t take good videos.

https://youtu.be/hu-RQx_NpAY?si=BMYbafbPAn2XAlU9

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

#116

Post by ThrowawayTestr »

leptons wrote: post #114
ThrowawayTestr wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you used it recently? The matrix configurator is much improved.

Yes I have used it recently. WLED is a joke for anything other than 1-dimensional arrays. It's the way the pixels are addressed and mapped in 2 dimensions that is the problem with WLED. It's especially difficult if your "grid" is anything but an exact square or rectangle, with skipped pixels, or multiple mapped areas, etc. I found it all to be extremely frustrating and a badly designed system. I tried WLED to see wha…

There is support for oddly shaped arrays but you gotta use a custom mapping function, there's a generator online for it. The discord is really helpful.

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

#118

Post by dyauspitr »

whatevertrevor wrote: post #83
dyauspitr wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Warm everywhere for me. There’s something about cold white that is very depressing. You would think more blue would mean less depressing but not in my experience.

Funnily enough we're currently in the process of replacing warm lights everywhere in our house with white lights. The warm lights make us feel sleepy and depressed especially in the winter, where there's already very little sunlight up here in Canada.

What works for me is the combination of warm lights that are very bright.

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

#119

Post by averageRoyalty »

slug wrote: post #78
averageRoyalty wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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!

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

#120

Post by zwb2324550 »

pwg wrote: post #2

https://kno.wled.ge/ Many 'effects' already prepackaged. Plus the ability to schedule time based changes (on/off/change pattern/etc.). Includes a web server to provide "app like" control over a phone or PC. Also includes integrations for several "home control" systems and a http API for programmatic control from another system. Can even synchronize plural controllers into a whole 'net' (note, I've not used this featu…

agree
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