Despite a rocky start with the SSC dongles and some cables going bad, solved by wrapping the SSCs and dongles with press n seal, one pixel with a shortlived water sensitivity, solved with CrossionX and a powersupply that had to be replaced.
The 20ft Mega Tree looked great. Even though I only had 16 80 node strings they were 10 times brighter than my 64 strings of incandesants.
It has now been throug several rains and is still working great.
I did discover that I should have programmed the strings in reverse of what I did which pretty much limited me to string mode that can be easily solved for next year.
I will also spend more time this summer making the strings all have the exact same pixel spacing. The spacing as it is would produce patterns that would have looked jagged because of the varriable spacing. I didn't put the strings under enough tension as I just laid them out on a floor for checking.