DiyLightAnimation
Fun => The Porch => Topic started by: Jeffl on January 27, 2013,
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It seams like the hype around regular LED's and controllers like the LE are on the decline. It doesn't seam like the LED pre-order talk activity was very high either this year.
Is RGB really this big or is it all hype?
I still have plenty of minis and was contemplating buying a bunch of regular LED's, but I'm wondering if we are going to see RGB LED's start to edge out regular LED's in the animated space.
What are your thoughts? Where are you expanding?
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It seams like the hype around regular LED's and controllers like the LE are on the decline. It doesn't seam like the LED pre-order talk activity was very high either this year.
Is RGB really this big or is it all hype?
I still have plenty of minis and was contemplating buying a bunch of regular LED's, but I'm wondering if we are going to see RGB LED's start to edge out regular LED's in the animated space.
What are your thoughts? Where are you expanding?
I had 12,100 channels this last season
32 channels of Lynx
12 channels of Aether II's
The rest (12,000 channels) were smart rgb. Rectangular, flex and strings. Megatree was 20x120 flex. Star was 60 smart rgb rectangular nodes. eaves were strings.
My 60 candy canes from walmart were on Lynx Express. I will add some more lynx this year, but mostly i will be adding more smart rgb. I was drawing like 2 amps on the 110v line for each 16 port hub. I ran all my lights on two 15amp circuits.
I originally just had the rgb lights but my wife thought something was missing. so we went and got all the incandescent lights from previous years and put them out.
I have a mailbox that opens and a letter comes out to santa. I got it from home depot maybe 5 years ago. I bought meteor tubes from ebay, 8 for $15. I had 8 strings of 8 or 64 tubes.
I would say half of my "great show" was for either the mailbox or the meteor tubes. So much for the whiz bang nutcracker effects. Most of the adults loved the megatree, but the kids (and they are the final judges , after all) liked the mailbox and the santa in a hot air balloon.
The price of smart rgb continues to drop. 3 years ago they were over $1 each, now they are under $0.40.
I like that i dont have 1000's of feet of SPT2, just cat5.
sean
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I started in 2011 with 1600 nodes of pixels and a bunch of red, green and white led strings. In 2012 I wanted to add blue. As I started to add up the cost for more colors of quality led strings I was amazed that pixels were not much more. I sold all led strings and went all pixel. I would say go for pixels now rather then later.
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I probably bought my last regular led except to replace strings that break. The pixels are too large to look good on my minitrees for example. Also I can't get the colors purple and orange on my pixels to look as good as a regular led. If I could I would use pixels for both Halloween and Christmas. By the time you buy 3 different colors of regular leds for everything the cost difference is not that far apart.
Sent from my Thunderbolt using Tapatalk 2.
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RGB is the future in my opinion. But I like having two colored strings of LEDs on at once. I like the mix of having red and green both on or blue and green or green and white. That kind of effect is hard to do when using pixels. That is one of the reasons my mega tree still has 64 strings of LEDs and will probably continue to have just LED strings. But I do have a 7ft 180deg pixel tree so I can play with RGB effects as well.
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My display is pretty small compared to some of the beasts I have seen here. I think I had about 7K LEDs. That is being phased out slowly with the RGBs. I replaced the windows with RGBs last year and this year I will get into the icicle aspect and hopefully the roof trim. My brother-In-Law has been there to sniff around and pick-up the old LEDs that I had (so much for selling them for about a $1 a strand).
GO WITH THE PIXELS!!!! With RJ's Etherdongle and SSC combo it just makes it all that much easier to go into.
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I am converting my mini trees to dumb strings, and most all of my additions for next year will be RGB.
A lot of the extra led strings I had are getting plugged into singing monsters.
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I also like having more then one color at a time. Its all personal preference. I have my windows outlined in 4 colors and you cant get the same effect from one string or strip. I have blue and warm white icecicles and would like to add green and red but having a large roof line but I will need 20 strings each $$$$$. But in the end buy what you want or you will just replace it in the end.
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RGB really is the future of this hobby, IMHO.
I don't think it means throw away everything else ... but it does mean less demand for the things you mentioned.
I don't think regular LEDs are the next mini just yet, as I see them being sold out every year at the store and most homeowners going to use them instead of incand. lights. No surplus inventory for us to benefit from, or then we may have a better argument to use them vs. rgb.
I think the average retail customer buys regular LED(s) and only a small % buy RGB as an enhanced (and more costly) form of LED ... maybe to out-do their neighbors?
I think in this hobby, you have to say compare the cost of (3) sets of LED vs. the cost of RGB ... and to me they are very similar and rgb might even be cheaper ... so why bother with traditional LED lights?
I know that I'm converting (as I can afford to) from traditional incand. mini lights to RGB ... and as I do it ,it appears I can sell off a lot of traditional AC controllers and cords along the way.
I have to agree with Sean that its awfully nice to coil up cat5 cords compared to extension cards or even spt2 cords.
I also admit that I've seen Sean' lights a couple times ... and while his 1/2 RGB megatree is amazing ... his snowfall tubes were also captivating!
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Everyone has very good discussion points and many I have thought about.
- Cost
- Node count for the money
- Flexibility
- less cords
- Wow factor
Looks
I like the looks of smaller sizes like the mini and m5.
Node Count
For some reason a massive amount of lights used properly always seams to look good.
Cost
RGB is justifiable but I don't like to do it on the 1 for 3 ratio
Stability
I like things that work and work well. Of course I like to see the tests first hand.
My last hangup is we have an indoor display nearby that uses a heavy amount of RGB CCRs and people always tell me how much more they like our display than this one. What I'm trying to figure out is; what do people really like as they could just be telling me this to make me feel good.
I think next year is going to be the same mini light/LED setup and add some RGB elements to see how it goes for me and my guests.
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Jeff, I totally understand your points and would actually stay with mini lights if I had a way of getting them at a fair price going forward. I think the problem is eventually going to be ... where do we buy the minis at?
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That's part of what is making the decision so hard. I still have a rather large stash of minis. I'm just not looking forward to the literally 50 hours to restring 31 mini trees from the ground up knowing they will be garbage in 3 years. ;D
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I think rgb pixels is just the latest trend that is in right now in lighting animation, but it will soon come to a end. Once the newness wears off and something else came out on the market; everyone will be switching to that new trend. My opinion, the chinese made nodes that everyone one loves buying is a piece of junk. The nodes are never really waterproofed enough like what is said, and till then i am not wasting my money on that stuff.
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That's part of what is making the decision so hard. I still have a rather large stash of minis. I'm just not looking forward to the literally 50 hours to restring 31 mini trees from the ground up knowing they will be garbage in 3 years. ;D
Doing just that right now. Taking leds off for dumb nodes. Not fun.
I only have 16 though.
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I'm curious to see what they look like when you're done.
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I don't have a problem with white minis as much as the red and esp. the green ... which just fade a lot. The other negative with minis is you have a bulb crushed or go out ... and you usually loose at least 1/2 the string. I noticed that some years, when the wind got bad ... it would whip the mini lights into the pole and then I'd have a lot broken and some GFCI trips because of that.
I agree that the quality of the SS nodes isn't the best (but has improved a lot) ... but what I do like is that I can splice out one bad node and replace it ... and it normally works on the rest of the string till I do that.
I also like that I can use anything between 1 node and 128 ... and vary spacing some. I mean, I'm a die hard mini light user (and will be for some time) ... but I hate being limited to 50 or 100 on everything ... and having one bulb being able to knock out stuff so easily. So while the new nodes DO stink, they have some advantages to be sure.
For me, in CO ... the rain just isn't an issue ... and the snow seems dry enough that its also really a non-issue. It did rain (just a little) last weekend, which is unusual, esp. for January and at night.
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I'm curious to see what they look like when you're done.
I will take a quick video in about a week or so.
I am currently working on the singing monster faces.
Making custom strings, and playing the light bright game.....
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I think rgb pixels is just the latest trend that is in right now in lighting animation, but it will soon come to a end. Once the newness wears off and something else came out on the market; everyone will be switching to that new trend. My opinion, the chinese made nodes that everyone one loves buying is a piece of junk. The nodes are never really waterproofed enough like what is said, and till then i am not wasting my money on that stuff.
Why do you say the pixels from Ray are junk? I had 4000 of them this year and had no issues . we had rain, snow and -5F weather.
The flex strips are in a plastic sleeve and sealed with 1" of RTV. I put one of them in the bathtub for 3 days to check the seal. no issues.
I understand that 2 years ago the pixels were ip66, water resistant. This last year they were ip68, water proof.
Now i haven't seen them for 2 or 3 years to see how they hold up but hundreds or thousands of DIY'ers are using them. I am sure if there was a large quality issue all the forums would have been full of comment. I find this crowd is not shy about sharing their opinion.
One , maybe valid reason, to hold off is that the price is dropping.
Today the 1809 flex strip is $0.35 per pixel
if you use 5v ws2811 its is $0.25 and 12v ws2811 is $0.21 per pixel.
3 or 4 years ago it was close to $1 per pixel. I assume it will only continue to drop. It is low enough now that i would rather be using them in a display this year rather than wait.
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I also noticed some of the new ws2811 strips have the chip mounted on the LED. I'm betting that this option reduces the cost of materials. Now if they could do something like this on the plain nodes that would help as well.
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I think rgb pixels is just the latest trend that is in right now in lighting animation, but it will soon come to a end. Once the newness wears off and something else came out on the market; everyone will be switching to that new trend. My opinion, the chinese made nodes that everyone one loves buying is a piece of junk. The nodes are never really waterproofed enough like what is said, and till then i am not wasting my money on that stuff.
Ouch.
Personally, I haven't changed over to RGB pixels yet for several reasons. The first was cost and not to mention being essentially a beta tester for such new technology, there was also the issue of programming thousands of nodes--both being able to do what I visualize in my head, and the amount of time that it takes. While the first two issues are--for the most part--a non-issue now, the ease programming is only now coming to reality. First came brilliant Sean's Nutcracker software creating effects, which was awesome but not my cup of tea as its effects were on its own "island" so to speak, but with rumours of it tightly integrating into Vixen 3 and HLS, along with so many other extras, now I'm starting to <;d .
I do have one concern about smart strings though... they aren't as "Christmassy" as traditional incandescent or LED strings--especially the strips. With the whole idea of my bushes changing colour and my gutter light pixels in chasing effects, I feel it would be less of a house decorated with Christmas Lights, and more of a cool light show that happens to be around Christmas time. (?)
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I do have one concern about smart strings though... they aren't as "Christmassy" as traditional incandescent or LED strings--especially the strips. With the whole idea of my bushes changing colour and my gutter light pixels in chasing effects, I feel it would be less of a house decorated with Christmas Lights, and more of a cool light show that happens to be around Christmas time. (?)
We say the exact same type of post about LED Christmas lights when they came out. I also read long ago when they went to electric Christmas lights from candles that some felt the same way. It fades and they become accepted as normal over a few years.
RJ
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Based on a few things using LEDs entirely, they are plenty 'Christmassy'. I judge this on the number of calls, emails, and notes I received from folks in my church, my neighborhood, my work, and my kids' organizations. There was not one that said, "You know that white is too white and not orange enough like the old incans". Most of the comments were Ooohs and Aaaahs followed by a comment on their favorite song/sequence. I have had more people stop me on the street and say, "you are part of our Christmas tradition now!" Not everyone is into the craziness of our hobby and there may be one or two detractors. But this pales in comparison of the ones that were truly touched by the show.
Kurt
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I also read long ago when they went to electric Christmas lights from candles that some felt the same way.
I guess that not accidentally burning your house down is a pretty good incentive to switch from candles!
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Great point about the switch from candles to incan. lights !
I know in some place, like new mexico, lumanaries are still rather popular ... and those candles inside bags always struck me as somewhat of a fire hazard, but they ARE beautiful !
I think a smart string node in a bag might even work?!
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Great point about the switch from candles to incan. lights !
I know in some place, like new mexico, lumanaries are still rather popular ... and those candles inside bags always struck me as somewhat of a fire hazard, but they ARE beautiful !
I think a smart string node in a bag might even work?!
I like how Zwiller used [plastic?] luminaries [tubs?] in his display. Simple, and it looks good too.
This example doesn't use smart strings, but you get the idea:
http://vimeo.com/34557139
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I also read long ago when they went to electric Christmas lights from candles that some felt the same way.
I guess that not accidentally burning your house down is a pretty good incentive to switch from candles!
The funny thing is that for the first few years that incandescent lights were used on Christmas trees, setting the tree on fire was a big issue. The lights simply got too hot. Technology improved but the lights still remained fairly hot on into the 60's. That is when the mini light come of the market. One of the big selling points for mini lights after the first couple of years is that you could actually touch a bulb that had been on for a while and not get burned.
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Great point about the switch from candles to incan. lights !
I know in some place, like new mexico, lumanaries are still rather popular ... and those candles inside bags always struck me as somewhat of a fire hazard, but they ARE beautiful !
I think a smart string node in a bag might even work?!
Now days a lot of luminaries use battery powered candles. I myself have a dozen rechargeable votive-style candles I use at halloween