My First Setup

foxvalleypcgeek · January 09, 2020, 11:36:18 AM

This was all done very fast right before Christmas. I actually found out about this stuff a couple weeks before and this was the result, by the end of the weekend before Christmas.

It went pretty good, except I made the tree to short at 12.5 feet, and as a result the spacing is wayyy to big at about 20 inches between strings on the bottom. And I would rather not cut the strips/strings shorter. So I will have to get up the section of pole in the ground and replace with a longer one, if the tree even stays there. There is a whole area to the left of the garage and driveway to tap into.

I have a lot of ideas, like a Matrix over the garage door. And the house lighting needs to be completely changed to get up on the peak, but I am not a fan of heights and with the cold and snow and such it didn't happen in such short time.

Everything is controlled by a bunch of NodeMCU boards (12) and running WLED, except for the tree which has a "real" controller. Wifi sucks and I had to put an access point out on the porch for everything in the front. I had lights just randomly turning on and off and various colors. I narrowed it down to the wifi not being sufficient from the added on back of the house. Looking at the F16V3, or the F48. I like the idea of Ethernet as I make a million of cables as it is and already several going to the garage and porch from the house as it is. It was running off of xchedular in a VM, but this last weekend was set up with a pi4 and FPP.

Here are a few quick videos with my phone, and our dog in the car barking at stranger dangers walking by for one of them.