Design & Build Blog

Planning the Show

A lot of reading has happened in the last month, in addition getting some valuable advice from the folks at the ACL Forums & Chat. This has led me down rabbit holes of research, to figure out the best way to design the show.

A number of questions needed to be answered, with each answer flowing into the next decision to be made.

  1. What do I want the finished display to look like? ie. What props, what effect, what sort of look am I going for?
  2. What types of lights should I use, strip, nodes, etc?
  3. Can I incorporate any of the existing light strings I already have?
  4. How will I control the lights?
  5. How will I distribute power to these lights?
  6. What hardware do I need to make this all happen?
  7. How much will it cost?
  8. What do I need to cull to fit into any reasonable budget?

In early January, I met up with one of the blokes from the ACL website, Kent. He had his first Christmas display up in 2021, so I’m trailing one year behind. He offered many pointers, and showed me his setup – unfortunately I didn’t get a chance to see it in action, but it was great to catch up and discuss things.

Being a lovely bloke, he also lent me a few pieces to play with – 40 odd nodes, an ESP32 controller and a DC-DC convertor. I had also picked up a 2m strip of LEDs from Jaycar in the interim and starting playing around with those hooked up to a Raspberry Pi. Some more technical posts on these will be coming up.

Over the next few posts, however, I’ll discuss the above decision points individually, and explore the answers that I have come up with.

In The Beginning

I’ve always been into Christmas light displays. Various basic light strings here and there, nothing too special. But the last few years I have been very slack.

In early December 2021, my right-hand neighbour put up a nice display, nothing too out there – a few Big W strings on the house, and around his fence. It was also at that same time which I was putting up the Christmas Tree, and getting all the decorations out.

So, I thought, why not put up some of the lights I had squirreled away. Motivation was also driven by the fact that in January 2021, I welcomed my first child into the world, and it would be nice to make something special.

However, I had no such luck, the old lights were all filament strings, and most weren’t working properly. So off to Bunnings, and I picked up 4 strings of lights, three for outside, one for the tree inside.

These came out pretty nice, for the first go – the neighbour on the left-hand side has two kids, 5 and 3, off memory, and they were amazed by the lights, despite how simple it could be.

So – what could I do to make it better? I’ve always been interested in computer driven lights, however where to start? Did I need to write software on an Arduino; build a lighting controller, and do it like that?

This is when I stumbled upon the Australian Christmas Lights forum (ACL). They have a fantastic guide (the ACL101) – which details all the bits you need to do, and consider, for a fantastic display. I was absolutely blown away by the software and hardware already out there to make this happen.

From there, the bug had bitten. I was hooked. The research started.