So would using 12v led strips be better, worse or the same for this project? I’ve been wanting to do this for a couple of years and really like the look those setups.
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Do it! It’s a great project. I love mine. I’m at the point now where I don’t do anything to get my Christmas lights going. I have automations in Home Assistant that turn them on at Sunset only during December. They cycle through a few effects every hour then turn off at 10pm. It’s awesome.
I did a video comparing 12v and 5v strings. https://youtu.be/zov-qIDSDcE
I’d say, in most cases 12v are going to be better. The biggest difference is less Voltage Drop effect. With the 12v strings you can go 5-6 strings (25-30m, 80-95ft) without seeing any dimming or color problems. With the 5v strings you have to add a voltage boost after every string (5m, 16ft). I didn’t know that when I did mine, so I used 5v because they were a little cheaper. Running the extra wire for voltage boost isn’t horrible, but does at time and pain to the install.
Good luck!
Let me know if you need help along the way.
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Thanks for the helpful reply! Maybe I’ll order a couple of strings and start playing around with them. Hopefully get my setup looking like yours one day haha.
I followed the instructions that you and Ben put together and have the lights running great. I started out running everything on an Arduino Mega. I just ran the demo from the FastLED library. It sufficed for the Christmas season. However now I’ve gone and switched over to a node mcu and have everything working with it including over the air updates.
What method have you used to get different patterns to come up on their own. For example at sunset I want it to run the following
Solid - 10 minutes
Confetti - 1 minute
Solid - 10 minutes
Juggle - 1 minute
I want it to continue to perform this sequence till say midnight.
I am controlling everything with home assistant obviously. I’ve tried running scripts that run the three different scenes then call out to another script which is conditional based on time, it then calls the main script again if the condition is met but it seems to hang. I’ll be calling the main script initially with an automation then letting the script run itself.
I haven’t put that much time into it but there is no rush and I don’t want to reinvent the wheel again.
Any suggestions would be appreciated.
I’ve done something similar all through HA automation:
automations old:
- alias: “Christmas LED Sunset Rotation”
initial_state: true
trigger:- platform: sun
event: Sunset
condition: - condition: template
value_template: ‘{{ now().month == 12 }}’
action: - service: mqtt.publish
data:
topic: “bruh/mqttstrip/seteffect”
payload: ‘Holly Jolly’ - delay: 01:00:00
- service: mqtt.publish
data:
topic: “bruh/mqttstrip/seteffect”
payload: ‘Candy Cane’ - delay: 01:00:00
- service: mqtt.publish
data:
topic: “bruh/mqttstrip/seteffect”
payload: ‘Christmas’ - delay: 01:00:00
- service: mqtt.publish
data:
topic: “bruh/mqttstrip/seteffect”
payload: ‘Holly Jolly’
- platform: sun
I don’t know how to get that to repeat, so to do exactly what you want would mean copying and pasting over and over to get it to last until midnight. Not a very elegant solution, but functional.
I have another automation that always turns the lights off at 10pm.
I just installed Node-Red. I’m hoping it will make complex automations easier. I can’t say much else about it right now, but it might be something for you to look into. There’s a repo by NotoriousBDG that includes the Node-Red add on.
Hope that helps
Hi,
i used your code and it works great.
No i want to change te direction of effect.
So like the police effect now from left to right. I want to change to right to left.
How can i change this?
That’s good to hear!
I don’t know how to reverse the direction. It’s possible there is a way, I just don’t know what it is. If it is possible the solution is probably in the fastLED library docs.
Sorry I’m not more help with this one.