Have any pictures or a site we can check out your Christmas display?
Mine is only ~20K LEDs (not including ones built into stuff/rope lights/letters/etc...), 19 inflatables, etc... I do not do any sequencing or music (nor do I want to) and it is almost all static LEDs. I have had pixels for some time for special projects (and a set of Really Big Lights) but I am going to be putting some out on tree-shapes this year (detailing in a different thread) as controllable colors/motion patterns.
I have a few pics I took while putting this together, but I don’t have any videos of the full display.
Is that 'Permatrack'?
Yes, it is. I had to paint it to match my house.
That is a LOT of track. About how many pixels is that?
2400 for the roofline.
Wow! Bet it looks pretty awesome. Linked to your Hubitat do you have sections come on as security lighting or such?
The Permatrack looks so awesome! I wish I could use it but my gutters hang below my soffit on my house.
Been brainstorming workarounds but haven't come up with anything yet. Any ideas?
What about mounting them to the gutters like normal lights?
Or... if you really want the track look, what about making an extended closed channel that hangs down below the gutter or an open-back channel that does the same thing?
I guess part of it is how much DIY you can (or are willing to) do.
I'd go with the channel used in the first video above then use 100% silicone to adhere it to the bottom of the gutter. That said I've never seen a gutter install like that before. Shouldn't it be pushed up under the drip edge with around an inch or 2 left on the facia?
Permatrack still might work. Here's a photo of another house I did where the gutters hung down below the facia.
They changed the profile of the PermaTrack after I did this and made it a bit smaller. They also changed the spacing from 3" to 2".
The smaller profile hangs down one and a quarter of an inch and the pixels add another half of an inch. I like the the looks of the smaller profile but it does make it a bit tighter if you're using any xconnect pigtails.
I have my controller and FM transmitter connected to a smartplug which is controlled by Hubitat, but it is just used to turn them on and off. I only have them come on when there is a holiday.
Gotcha. I have Gardenspots year round to light the house a little depending on holiday, then more lights for Halloween and Christmas.
One thing I am thinking on for my WS2812 lights is to have a Rule for a motion sensor that will trigger a different effect.
My controller takes a few minutes to completely boot so it wouldn’t make sense to do this unless I left the controller on all the time. I guess I could schedule it to come on between sunset and sunrise but for the amount time it would actually be used I think it would be better on the controller to just leave it off.
Gotcha. I am working on EEPROM memory now for mine so I can leave it plugged in all the time and trust it will keep the LEDs off if it reboots for some reason and they were SUPPOSED to be off for example. Plus all the other settings of course.
You could easily do this is you used a Dig-Quad Led Controller with WLED and the community WLED driver. The driver even has a status for strobe and alert.
I probably could. But I have been doing my own and learning bits and pieces here and there as I go. I write drivers (and all this other stuff) as a hobby, so I am OK "missing out" on WLED because I am enjoying this. For some things I look for other people's drivers because I am just not interested in doing it myself, but I have been writing arduino (or arduino-like) projects for some time and kept meaning to link them together. I made a driver to read my WeatherCloud Particle Photon project (it monitored sensors and submitted the data to WeatherCloud's service) by adding a json status page to the Photon (rather than writing to the WeatherCloud API, then reading it back down). This was all just an "obvious outcome" from multiple different projects I keep working on.
Oh right, I forgot you were righting your own stuff. I thought you were looking for suggestions. My bad.
I actually am gleaning a lot of information from this entire thread so digress on. I'm starting to learn what I'm in for...(Another farking rabbit hole).....
Download the Hubitat app
