A New Hobby

I have been fascinated by Christmas Lights with music videos on YouTube for a long time. I thought it may be a good hobby for me. Of course I am very late in starting this hobby as the recommended time to start to build your layout is June but I am happy with how it has turned out since starting in November. These are not ordinary Christmas lights as each individual light or more correctly pixel, can be turned on and off using sixteen million possible colours. All controlled by a computer that synchronises lights to music with very complex patterns and effects.

So, I purchased one thousand, five hundred pixels from a store in China on November 11 and designed a layout which has resulted in the following small layout attached to our front fence. It is still being tweaked so the bottom arches are complete and will update the videos when I can.

I have used the free program xLights to design and publish to a Rasberry Pi connected to a Advatech PixLight 4 Mk II light controller. Links to the program and a lot of good information can be found here https://xlights.org/. I did try to create a music sequence but with little time, I downloaded some others from the xLights community sharing site and modified them for my setup. So far I have modified thirteen music sequences with another six under construction.

I will get more pixels for next year but we do not have the space to make a large setup like some in the YouTube videos that have thirty to forty thousand pixels and just look spectacular. I urge you to have a look. Some are just over the top.

Here are three more music sequences from my collection.