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Ask HN: What are the best programmable holiday lights?

251 points| sh1mmer | 1 year ago

I am replacing some old outdoor lights and I want to get LED lights that I can program? Any suggestions on the best ones? Ideally replaceable/extendable light strings with some kind of programmable controller that has usb/wifi. If it has an app my family can use that’s a plus.

115 comments

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pwg|1 year ago

https://kno.wled.ge/

Many 'effects' already prepackaged. Plus the ability to schedule time based changes (on/off/change pattern/etc.). Includes a web server to provide "app like" control over a phone or PC. Also includes integrations for several "home control" systems and a http API for programmatic control from another system. Can even synchronize plural controllers into a whole 'net' (note, I've not used this feature yet).

Small ESP32 boards (with wifi capability) such as this example (no affiliation, just an example that works):

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09Y8X1GK7

WS2811 LED strings [1] (of which there are an infinite variety) suitable for outdoor use. One example (no affiliation):

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CYZF1WCR

Suitable power supplies, outdoor weather sealed boxes, and wiring (all left to you to locate).

Willingness to assemble the pieces and some time to do so. Having a soldering iron is helpful here, although one could possibly get by with screw terminal blocks inside weatherproof boxes if need be for many of the 'connections'.

[1] Or other 'programmable LED' strings for which WLED is compatible (it works with numerous different programmable LED standards, browse the WLED website for details).

codetrotter|1 year ago

> kno.wled.ge

I want to take a moment to ackno.wled.ge how absolute awesome of a domain hack “kno.wled.ge” is for the website of a WLED project!

eddieroger|1 year ago

I used WLED and some WS2811 lights for Halloween this year, and I was blown away but how much it _just worked_. As long as I kept the order of the lights correct (there are arrows, derp), they just strung along. I ended up with a decently complicated array, but as long as my counts were good, the thing just worked. Govee is a very mainstream brand currently using WS2811-based lights, and with a little knife action, you can add them in. I'm hopeful next year to play with some 2D matrix stuff in it.

sowbug|1 year ago

The most plug-and-play WLED-compatible controller I've found is made by athom.tech and available on AliExpress <https://www.aliexpress.com/store/1101393719>. There are two versions based on the ESP32C3. One is powered by USB-C @ 5V, and the other has a barrel jack and passes through 5-24V to the lights, which is useful if you're using a higher-voltage strip like WS2813.

I used to build my own controllers from ESP development boards, but it's just not worth it when an enclosed controller with convenient connectors is priced between $10-20.

quickthrowman|1 year ago

I strongly suggest not buying any electronic components from Amazon, but 5VDC LED light strings should be OK.

Do not roll the dice on the power supply, buy a UL listed one. If you buy some shitty Chinese PSU and it lights your house on fire, your homeowners insurance will deny the claim.

This one puts out 30w @ 5VDC and is also UL listed: https://poliledsigns.com/shop/poli-5vdc-30w-waterproof-led-p...

Even though it says ‘waterproof’, it needs to be installed in an enclosure, NEMA 3R rated enclosure if it’s installed outdoors.

leptons|1 year ago

WLED is nice for 1-dimensional LED strips, or if you don't really care how the animations project on your LEDs, but anything in 2 dimension is painful, the grid mapping in 2D is just overly complicated and obscure. I barely got my simple LED matrix working and I've been doing LED grids with my own software for over 10 years (so I know how easy it can be). WLED was just an awful experience for 2D led arrays or anything more complex than a single LED strip.

jhardy54|1 year ago

Warning: don’t buy an ESP32-C6 for this. It’s not compatible with WLED/ESPHome/etc and it isn’t clear whether/when this will be resolved.

neotek|1 year ago

Seconding WLED, it's fantastic. Super easy to install and operate, compatible with HomeAssistant, the built in effects are great, the web app / native mobile apps are powerful but straightforward, and the community offers plenty of help and other resources.

joshstrange|1 year ago

WLED is the clear answer here. I got a simple USB controller (usb just for power) so it can’t run a a massive strand of lights (at least at full brightness) but it was perfect to dip my toes in and try out.

The Home Assistant integration works great as well.

Firerouge|1 year ago

It also supports DMX input (sACN or Art-Net) for designing and controlling complex effects from external software.

beala|1 year ago

This is a tangent, but I feel like we can't talk about LED christmas lights without linking to this video by tech connections: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBFPJ3_6ZWs

the tl;dw is that most color LED lights work by emitting a single frequency of light. Compared to classic christmas lights, which are incandescent filaments filtered through dyed glass, the LED lights look a bit... radioactive.

My personal pet peeve are white LED lights. If you're not careful to buy the ones labeled "warm" they look cold, and imo, not very festive and inviting.

Of course, this is all a matter of taste, but once I became privy to the difference, I could no longer ignore it. I guess I'm just a millennial nostalgic for the lights of my youth.

binary_slinger|1 year ago

> My personal pet peeve are white LED lights. If you're not careful to buy the ones labeled "warm" they look cold, and imo, not very festive and inviting.

I completely agree. This is true also for all household LED lighting. I prefer cold for kitchen food prep areas and bathrooms, but warm everywhere else.

majormajor|1 year ago

I think definitely a matter of taste sprinkled with nostalgia.

I wanted to get the incandescent opaque-paint-covered lights I grew up with but the power consumption - and the number of outlets required if you follow the "don't chain more than 2 or 3 strings together" guidance - was (unsurprisingly, in retrospect) WAY higher, so I just found the closest LED version I could find.

They look pretty decent at the end of the day, and one pro is that you can get more brightness and vividness out of them (helpful if you have other newer, bright-LED decorations).

tannedNerd|1 year ago

I’ve been super impressed so far with the Govee lights I’ve gotten. The app is pretty easy to use has tons of cool effects, and they have a LAN API (https://app-h5.govee.com/user-manual/wlan-guide) for most of their lights that have WiFi. Don’t have enough time this year to program a custom show but was going to start earlier next year now that I have a couple of these. The new scene stage thing they just released where you can map your lights and have them all work together is pretty slick too.

linsomniac|1 year ago

That's very good to hear, because last year on Black Friday I got a couple of dual 36' Govee light strips and am just planning on putting them up today, as a permanent install. It's been a long-time dream of mine to have permanent holiday lights. These are the ones that are the strips with an LED every few inches, individually controllable. Looking over at Amazon it looks like they have the 65ft kit I got for $70 right now ($40 off coupon).

Last year we put up this Govee LED grid "curtain" and my son had some fun programming it.

havnagiggle|1 year ago

Is Govee the down-cone style? Or are there also others doing that? There's been a couple of houses that have this and I wasn't sure what they are using, but it's the only one that I would consider doing whole house exterior. Many others look too sharp.

chris_overseas|1 year ago

A lot of people here are recommending WLED for the controller, but I would suggest you look at the Pixelblaze [1] instead. I've used both in a bunch of different projects and strongly prefer Pixelblaze over WLED.

Some reasons why: - It has a much more intuitive user interface - It's far easier to program new patterns. Programming is done in-browser with a language that's a subset of Javascript, with code changes being applied in realtime. - Due to the way its rendering engine works, the patterns it produces are generally far more 'organic' looking and smoother than most of the WLED ones. - It's possible to map LEDs in arbitrary 2D or 3D configurations (think lights strewn all over a Christmas tree), which WLED can't really do at all. - If you have multiple Pixelblazes you can get them to sync with each other over Wifi. - A really helpful community forum.

Downside: - The firmware isn't open source, though some of its tooling is, and the firmware is stable and gets fairly regular updates, so it's not a huge issue to me. YMMV.

For the LEDs, you probably want wired bullet-style strings of LEDs rather than the thin copper LED strips since they're generally more suited to outside use. By far the most common (and generally cheapest) type of LEDs are WS-2812B or similar. They're OK, though you might notice they don't have good definition at low brightness levels. APA-102 or equivalent are a bit more expensive, but have MUCH better dynamic range, so I'd suggest going for these if you can. There are other better (and more expensive) LEDs still, but it starts to become diminishing returns, plus they can be hard to come by or find suitable controllers for. If you're running lengths of more than a 150 or so LEDs then power starts to matter, and you'll either need to inject power regularly into the strips, and/or use LEDs designed to take 12V or 24V. These can come with caveats such as worse power consumption and/or fewer addressable LEDs per meter, so research what you're buying carefully.

[1] https://electromage.com/pixelblaze

jerich|1 year ago

This gets such a huge thumbs up that I had to scroll up and reread it to make sure this wasn’t my own post from a revived thread from last year!

I’ve been using a pixelblaze with a long string of cheap 2812 LEDs on my Christmas tree for three years now with tons of compliments from neighbors.

I’m an embedded software guy, and every year I mean to dig in and try roll my own, or do something clever with an RP2040 board (also a shoutout for the Pimoroni Plasma), but the demands of life and “get the light show started” mean I keep using the Pixelblaze.

I even upgraded to their newer versions last year, and used some of the smaller ones to make some LED tutus for my girls that synced pattern with the tree (the tutus were synced with each other for a Christmas show, but it was trivial to then add the tree for fun afterwards).

The mapping is huge for the wow factor, and the pixelblaze makes it so much easier to get something fast and good enough.

There’s so many community-shared patterns to choose from, and it’s been easy to make small modifications to look better once mapped to a tree, though most work as-is.

My project I won’t get done this year is to try to make some calibration patterns and use ChatGPT to analyze some photos/videos to make a 3-D map, but I’ll realistically probably end up with the vaguely-triangular 2-D map again; I can get it done in about 30 minutes now.

The following is a couple years ago. I think last year I was up to 1100 LEDs and the mapping was a bit better, but I didn’t take good videos.

https://youtu.be/hu-RQx_NpAY?si=BMYbafbPAn2XAlU9

entangledqubit|1 year ago

I ended up buying a couple strings of Twinkly lights a while back - after considering a diy solution. The mobile app has been solid and (assuming they didn't muck it up) there's are libraries out there for interfacing to them as well (over WiFi). The cost is not cheap but seems fair to me and seems to be well built. (The light mapping is pretty fun. You can zigzag a bunch of lights across a wall and basically create a low res display.)

sixothree|1 year ago

Another +1 for Twinkly. I don't own them but a close friend does. And to say they are impressive is an understatement. You just wrap them like you do normally and the software is smart enough to map each light's physical location.

For any addressable light system for a tree or bush I would recommend getting more lights than you think you need.

My personal christmas decoration consists of a charly brown christmas tree with a single ornament on it. It started as a joke (and convenience for ongoing construction), but it became a tradition. I truly appreciate the zen nature of unfolding it into an appealingly broken pattern and also having just a single ornament.

yumcimil|1 year ago

+1 for twinkly lights. I've had some WS2801s that are about a decade old from Aliexpress for ages. This time lighting the tree, discovered quite a few scorch marks and melted insulation. Twinkly lights were 66% off locally, so gave 'em a go. They're still RGB, but blend into the tree a fair bit better. The LED spatial mapping stuff kinda works - it's not perfect, but gives you enough to be able to have decent fades top to bottom and side to side.

I have no intention of swapping to Twinkly for my normal accent lighting around the house - btf-lighting.com + WLED is still your friend for that.

shaftway|1 year ago

Another +1. I've found that it takes a lot of scans to get a solid representation of the tree, but I love the way they show you the quality of the scan (LEDs with well known positions are green, poorly are red, and mid is yellow). I think I had to do about 30 scans to get all of the lights I cared about, but I also put lights deep into the tree.

I wish there was a bit more customization. Particularly around the flashing effect. Also, oddly, the color settings are HSV, but they don't give you the V, so you can't get a clean grey color. I wanted dim white lights with sparkle flashes, but I haven't been able to make that happen.

TheJoeMan|1 year ago

Second Twinkly for the question of “will this company still be around in a few years”. They seem to have branched out into non-holiday lights too which improves their business stability.

sircastor|1 year ago

This is a huge space to get into. I’m on my fourth year doing an outdoor light show.

My personal preference is 12v ws2811 bullet-style voltage-regulated nodes. They’re extendable, individual nodes on a strand are replaceable if you’re willing to do some cutting and crimping.

I like the 12v because you can go for longer strands without losing colors from voltage drop. Regulated over a resistive voltage divider = less heat.

As has been mentioned, you can install WLED onto a microcontroller and have a web-page for a remote control.

averageRoyalty|1 year ago

I'm sure you know but for others reading, 12v ws2811 are grouped in threes, so not individually addressable. 5v is, and when you're working at scale power injection isn't a huge deal as you'll be doing it anyway.

Always standardise your connectors. I'm a fan of the Ray Wu ones.

ESP/WLED driven is my preference, but the Falcon controllers are popular amongst people who are more DIY/woodworking oriented as they're much simpler to set up and not _heaps_ more expensive. Falcon Player/xlights is the standard software for designing/playback of your show regardless of hardware.

Coro props (corrugated plastic, corflute) are a cheap and effective way to stand out from the crowd. Animatronics, smoke etc are also an option when going more advanced.

It's a lot of work. You rarely want to start after October or order your goods after July. You are running a live production and things will go wrong. Good luck to anyone entering the space, it's very fun and expensive!

INTPenis|1 year ago

I know programming but only very rudimentary hardware, how difficult is this to do? Are there guides?

SoftTalker|1 year ago

White, non-blinking lights are the only acceptable holiday lights. All others are exceedingly tacky and should be banned.

riiii|1 year ago

I didn't know you had Internet access up in the mountain, Mr Grinch.

kd5bjo|1 year ago

My parents have always gone for an absolutely huge number of white mini-lights on the tree. So many that they have to be plugged into a dimmer circuit so that the intensity isn’t blinding.

tedchs|1 year ago

I've used strings of Twinkly lights for a couple seasons now. They can sometimes be found on eBay for cheap. They're easy to set up, whether standalone or by clustering multiple units into one larger virtual canvas. The app has a lot of good looking animated patterns included.

highdeserthackr|1 year ago

Several years ago I made a simple 2D display with WS2812B led strings, just daisy chained together for a serial interface. Controlled by an ESP8266, with a number of static images (snowflakes, xmas trees) that scroll or display with various effects (e.g. falling snowflakes). 9 led strings are simply draped over a ~9 ft tall pvc rack in a coarse 2D front and back display. Not that much work to put together and surprisingly nice looking effects are possible.

charleslmunger|1 year ago

If you're interested in DIY:

LED lights as a string or strip - sk8612 are RGBW, which you need if you want a nice looking white. Lots of strips of varying density and waterproofing are available everywhere; strings ("pixels") can be harder to find but are available on AliExpress.

Controller is https://quinled.info/

Runs wled which has a simple web interface, mobile apps, and works with home assistant.

NoMoreNicksLeft|1 year ago

I keep wondering why lights aren't getting built into new-build homes. They're no longer bulbs, but LEDs, they're programmably colored (you can do orange/purple for Halloween, etc), and they'd be practically invisible when off.

Have them around eaves/gutters, windows, whatever. Is there some aspect of this I'm not getting that makes it impractical (or ugly in the off seasons)?

atonse|1 year ago

It’s probably as simple as builders being cheap. It won’t help them charge more.

Unless it’s a home built for one customer.

ramones13|1 year ago

If you ever want to go all out with a musical light show, I have some recommendations here: https://aluhrs.com/blog/holiday-lights-electronics/

For your specific question, Wally’s Lights is great, and like others have mentioned, something running WLED to control them is a great choice.

copperx|1 year ago

Is this the best choice if I wanted to wire the outside of entire house?

silverlight|1 year ago

Somewhat related topic: anyone used something like the Luxedo to do a projection mapping? It seems like it’s more complicated and expensive but I love the idea of doing something cool to the house for Halloween and Christmas without having to lug out a ton of lights and decorations.

rapjr9|1 year ago

There are several open source projection mapper projects that run on a RaspPi, or other platforms, here are a few of them:

https://github.com/arisona/mpm

https://ofxpimapper.com/

https://mapmapteam.github.io/

There are media players and graphics generators that will run on a RaspPi also. Finding a bright enough projector and sheltering it for outdoor use might be the main challenge.

Another approach might be a galvo scanned laser with DMX software to control it, though there may be safety/liability issues with that.

moepstar|1 year ago

I‘m fascinated by these projection setups ever since I learned they’re a thing! But Jesus is the Luxedo stuff pricey?! I’d love to learn about something similar but in a kinda OSS/DIY kind of style…

luxuryballs|1 year ago

I want a mesh grid of LEDs that I can lay across the house maybe with 6” between each one so I get a low res screen of dots and then play Die Hard on it to see if people figure it out. It would kind of be like a TV but with 9 out of 10 pixels missing, more or less.

blutack|1 year ago

You could use ws28xx/skxx based addressible strips laid out in rows. Usually WLED would be recommended to drive it, but for playing a video, the teensy fastled library comes with a demo specifically doing what you discuss with a film.

https://quinled.info/2019/06/03/what-digital-5v-12v-rgbw-led... good intro to the subject.

Tepix|1 year ago

Maybe i can piggyback onto this question: Are there timer switches that can change the times depending on the calendar? I want to turn on some lights shortly after sunset but they don't have a brightness sensor. So i'd like to do it by time of day.

sowbug|1 year ago

If you're already using Home Assistant and WLED, this is a cinch. You could even write an automation that plays your home team's colors each night they win a game.

josefresco|1 year ago

We've been happy with our Twinkly lights (after several years). Not really "DIY" but you can create your own light scheme/shows.

https://twinkly.com

oigursh|1 year ago

Returning my black Friday set. The app is a split-brained and buggy.

ryukoposting|1 year ago

Not quite what you're looking for perhaps, but I'm very happy with my "dumb" lights controlled with a couple smart plugs flashed with Tasmota.

criddell|1 year ago

We have the Twinkly lights and they are pretty neat. You put them on your tree and you don't have to be careful about where or how you lay them out because step 2 is point your phone camera at the tree and it turns the lights on and off to map where each bulb is. You move around the tree until they are all mapped (lights go from orange to green when mapped).

The app has a bunch of canned patterns and there's an online site for user designs and of course you can design your own. It's a lot of fun and they aren't terribly expensive (there was a good black friday sale).

asjfkdlf|1 year ago

I bought these and they are great. They strike a balance of programmable, but have a kit. Relatively simple for a novice

anfractuosity|1 year ago

Has anyone come across many distributors for HD108 LED strips per chance? I've found only the bare LEDs on Aliexpress currently.

kodt|1 year ago

The Eufy / Govee outdoor light strips are probably the easiest to install and setup.

daredoes|1 year ago

Check out Twinkly. Little pricey, but if you can grab them on sale they're super cool.