We use the following music and material in our light show:
- Wish Background by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ - Jingle Bells by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ - We Wish You a Merry Christmas by United States Marine Band is licensed under a Public Domain Mark 1.0 License.
- WhyChristmas.com The Christmas Story
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ - Emoji art supplied by EmojiOne
Although I decorated my house in 2015, this was the first year I exclusively used computer controlled lights. This year I am running 1482 pixels on my house. In addition, I am running 16 channels of AC lights (icicles, garland, landscaping strands). Further, I have nine 10w RGB floods on the house. On the church, I am running 4 channels of AC lights around the door (not pictured in diagram) and two 50w RGB floods on the building and a 20w RGB flood on a manger on the front lawn. This leaves me with a tad over 1500 total channels.
Making virtually everything myself and using off spec products for much of the pixels, I was able to save a substantial amount of money. If you are looking to get started in this hobby (especially in the RGB part), know that most of your time and money will be spent on wiring. I had to be very creative at times with what type of wire I used and how I ran the wires to minimize this expense.
I am running most of the display off of a Falcon F16R2 (1346 pixels). This is running roughly 316 watts off of one side and 201 watts off the other. I am using a Meanwell power supply on the 316 watt side. I worried about the cheap China power supply on the other one so I am running the remaining 134 pixels off of an AlphaPix 4 using approximately 87 watts. I am also using one of the RS485 outputs on the Falcon F16R2 to put out a DMX universe for the floods and analog light controllers.
The floods on the house are powered by a dumb 30 channel controller from HolidayCoro. The 120v AC lights on the house are controlled by a LynxExpress 16. On the church, they are run by a Lynx SSR4. The high power floods on the church are powered by 3 channel DMX constant current controllers from Amazon. I used these in both 350ma and 700ma versions for the 50 and 20 watt floods (there is a solder point to change boards from one current to the other). The reason I went with constant current was to avoid needing a resistor to limit current in the floods as I didn’t want to burn out the red LED’s. These work great and the lights are very bright.
The whole show is sequenced on xlights 4 and the show is run by a Falcon Pi Player on an Raspberry Pi 2. These are great programs and very inexpensive (free plus the Pi).
For more information about my display, visit my page on my design.
