Thanks for the happy T-Day. Had 2 people come over, my old neighbors. They are bolt older (close to 80) and they no longer are my neighbors. so old fits in 2 ways. They are what I would call my second mom and dad. Really nice folks and I have helped them out with all kinds of things from computers to installing a new HVAC system in their house.
So next up on my todo list is to put up 24,000 ish twinkling Christmas lights.
It comes out looking like this.
Wow, that’s something. We have only one chain of lights 
If I can manage to locate a blow molded Santa in a sleigh with his reindeer I am going to make it fly through a 900’ long track I made that loops through the front of my property. I used it for flying ghosts for Halloween. Made the track using 300lb braided fishing line, a bunch of old bicycle wheels and a large motor from a clothes dryer. Everything in the way of Santa and reindeer decorations are all those stupid inflatable ones. I need something I can light up with LED’s using batteries and requires no other power. Those inflatable ones only stay inflated if there is a fan attached to it. So that’s not going to work.
All of those lights are also incandescent, not a single LED. I am pretty close to the limit of what the electric service coming into the house is able to provide. I am probably going to have to trench to the pole and drop some new cable in conduit to get the service increased to 250 amps. I am at 100 amps now.
I would love hear stories like this, but let’s move it to an OFF topic discussion to keep this thread clean. 
You’re the administrator of the forum. Move the posts. You have the power!!! LOL…
Moved to a new topic
HEY!!! There ya go…
Speaking of Christmas lights. I have a crafty idea that I am going to use LVGL for. I am going to put it onto a raspberry PI and attach my projector to it. Point it at the front of my house. This way I won’t have to climb up 2 stories on a ladder to hang lights on my house. The projector I have is pretty damned bright. 2300 lumen which is equivalent to a 150watt incandescent light bulb or about a 28watt LED which is about what a single LED headlight on a car is. So it’s bright to say the least. Shouldn’t have any issue making it look like some pretty cool Christmas lights.
That sounds like a fun project.
Sounds interesting!
6 years ago I created a 1.5m x 2m matrix from ~750 LEDs, put it above our bed and when my girfriend saw it for the first time it was showing the “Would you marry me?” text. It was also driven by LVGL (actually LittlevGL at that time)
So yeah, only your creativity is the limit!
Projects like this are what bring things down into the real world level. These are things that people can do with it. A front end would need to be written kind of like squareline studio so a person would not have to write code. I could see people paying for something like this only because I know how much people despise putting up Christmas lights and taking them down. not to mention having to find the bad bulbs and everything else that goes along with it. It’s a royal pain and takes up a lot of time to do.
If a UI was made where a user could feed in a picture of their house, select different types of lights they wanted to add and place the lights on top of the image so they would know where the lights are actually getting places on the house. select the light string, click on the start position and click on the end position. provide settings for color and flashing patterns. Can make it really involved to do complex patterns by providing scripting support.
Set it up one time and it’s ready to go every year. The limit to how large of a display is able to be done is only limited by the number of projectors that a person could attach… This is a pretty cool idea actually.
can add things like the deer in the front yard by using black mesh nylon screen. It can be made to look 3D too by putting several screens one right behind the other only a few inches apart from each other. This works as I have already done it for my Halloween decorations. Have a look
These are still uploading so it might be a little bit before it’s done. The first one gives you a better idea as to what the projection things on a screen does. This is a cheap 35 dollar projector I am using and the screen is really far away. It is a decent size screen but it is made from 2 pieces which didn’t work out exactly the way I wanted.
This one shows a swamp effect I made using 2 really high powered green lasers and a fig machine that is able to run continuously
