Hi guys :-) Last Christmas, my daughter there is now 3 years old,

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Hi guys :slight_smile:

Last Christmas, my daughter there is now 3 years old, fell in love with a house, that have all kind of static Christmas lights all over.
As the fun father I am, I want to make that for her, but with lights that can pulse, flash, move and sparkle.

I have tried to find out what hardware to use, and it seems like WS2811/12 is the right LED lights to use.

But what hardware to control those LED strings?

Raspberry pi, Arduino, some ESP8266 boards? Or a mix of all of them?

My plan is to outline of side of the roof - 4 sides, maybe more. My dream is I can control those sides by them selves, and change color and effect for those.

Then I will make some stars, christmas trees and stuff like that, and put up there too. Again, the dream is I can control every star and tree by them self, so one star can be yellow and make a slow pulse, and another star is red and sparkles.

I don’t know if fastled is the right at all, but I hope you can help me in the right direction.

I have found a lot about people that use expensive controllers, but they make animations and synchronize the lights to music. I won’t do that.

I hope to get pushed in the right direction here, so I can start build and program it all.

Thank you :slight_smile:

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By house, I assume you mean dollhouse.

If you’re planning on using controls, I recommend APA102 instead of WS2812’s. 4 wire LED’s allow for more control options with an Arduino than WS2812’s.

You also want to think what kind of controls you want to use. In my case, I use an Infrared controller (24 buttons) in conjunction with an Arduino Nano and APA102’s all powered by USB power banks, and have lots of pre-programmed and controllable sequences.

Finally, I recommend you do this in stages and slowly build (and test each stage) up to your final project. Here’s a possbility:

  1. Learn FastLED to your satisfaction.
  2. Learn some controls to your satisfaction.
  3. Basic integration of controls and FastLED.
  4. Design of your animation control protocol.
  5. For larger installations, learn power management.
  6. Finish your project.
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@Andrew_Tuline thank you for your answer.

About the doll house, now I fell kind of stupid saying it’s actually my real house :wink:
Is this the wrong way to do it then?

I guess the outline of the house is a couple of 100 LEDs - depending on how far apart from each other they are.

The stars I’m talking about is well, between 50-160 depending on the size of them.

Is this the wrong approach?

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Something like this I want


Is there somewhere where I can see the max number of pixels on the different devices? :slight_smile:

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A real house adds a whole new dimension. .

Consider that standard LED strips contain 30 LED’s per M, so you may end up with a LOT more than a couple of hundred LED’s.

You’ll also need to concern yourself with waterproofing, and you will definitely have power issues.

For a larger amount of LED’s, I’d be looking into a Teensy, and possibly an Octows2811. I’d also then go back to WS2812’s, as a Teensy has much more power than a standard Arduino.

Either way, depending on your background, start out with a small project and eventually work up to the big one.

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Are you sure you don’t want to start with a doll house? :wink:
Maybe start with one of the stars. Or a smaller star. It will allow you to do A LOT of learning and experimenting without getting into too huge of a project. Plus you can hang the star in your daughter’s room when it’s not Christmas season. :slight_smile:

Definitely break your project up into smaller parts and work each of those out.
The Teensy 3.2 is a great board.

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I think the simplest approach would be an arduino compatible board of your choice and fastled example code and a 12vdc supply (if using 12v ws2811) and away you go.

I would recommend understanding the hardware and software side on a doll house setup and then scaling up both for your house. That way you’ll have some idea of what is going on when things fail due to data signal issues, voltage drop issues, over current on strip wiring, failing ws2811 chips/connections.

Great fun this stuff for sure.

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I just finished almost exactly what you’re describing. I used 5v ws2811s w/ 50 LEDs per 5m. That’s about the perfect spacing for outside Christmas lights. I control them with a wemos D1 mini through Home Assistant using MQTT. Pretty slick, but I can’t take much credit for it. I used code from Ben at Bruh Automation: https://youtu.be/9KI36GTgwuQ

I’m actually still trying to make some more custom colored animations. That’s why I’m here in the FastLED world, looking for help.

Anyone know if/how I can change the color palettes in colorpalettes.cpp? Or maybe just add a different colorpalette in my arduino sketch? The sketch I’m using calls color palettes from the .cpp file. I just want to copy some of the same animations but using different colors.

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In my case, I create palettes on the fly. Here’s one way to create a random 16 colour palette:

void SetupRandomPalette() {
for (int i = 0; i < 16; i++) {
targetPalette[i] = CHSV(random8(), 255, 255);
}
}

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@Justin_Aden ​ Please create a new post with your color palettes question.
If you have code to show what you are trying to do it’s recommended to put it on http://gist.github.com and share the link.

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If you looking to do Christmas light shows and animate them with lights I can help. I use the teensy/octows2811 that can do this. There are a couple ways to interface them to show players (by USB or using a network connection).

Reading further down you mentioned that you wont do that… is it because of cost? Personally If your going to animate lights it’s might be easier with show software and saving those animations to a raspberry falcon pi player (fpp). I think writing sequence code for each element could take longer. Although many here have code ready to use and that you can manipulate but if your in need to design a certain effect or have each element animate in sync then your going to get your hands dirty with code (great way to learn )

Show software has ready to use effects and in my opinion will be easier.

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It seems if you want to jump into thousands, tens of thousands of LEDs, or matrix panels (which is what it would take to do a house) and animate various displays or props together (especially with music) then the solution might be something like ‘xLights’ or ‘Vixen’. There are lots of websites devoted to the hobby, but it is expensive!!

I’m happy to put together a few new elements a each year and know that I coded them myself with FastLED and that is a proud accomplishment.

This is just one forum that can help you, but there are many more:
http://doityourselfchristmas.com/