alt Hacker NewsThis 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.