alt Hacker NewsI 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.)
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+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.
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.
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.
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.