Beginner's Guide to Christmas Lights - and LED Shows for Every Holiday

I am on a personal mission to bring freaking cool holiday LEDs to the masses you don't have to spend thousands of dollars or have a degree in computer programming to have the coolest multicolored LEDs in the neighborhood if you can hang Christmas lights and have a computer and fingers you can do this ready go first let's talk about the LEDs when you see people have those fancy light shows on their houses they're using what's called individually addressable LEDs that means each little light gets assigned its own color and brightness if you want a lot of really good really technical information about all the different kinds of addressable LEDs check out hookup Rob's video I'm a simple man so I'm gonna keep things simple first choice you need to make when choosing your awesome new LEDs his do you want strings or strips the strings look like this they're the most like traditional bulbs each little bulb is 3 inches apart they come in 5 meters strings which is 16 feet for all you heathens in America and they're waterproof you can get them in 5 volts or 12 volts and they usually cost around 12 to 15 dollars per string those are the ones that I have on my house the other option is strips strips are flat some are waterproof some are not and they come in a whole wide variety of LED density meaning how far apart are the LEDs you can get them all stacked right next to each other or you can get them spaced out so that there's about 150 LEDs in 5 meters the more LEDs you have the more current you need and the more expensive they are what you choose just depends on what look you want another thing to consider when choosing your LEDs is how you want to mount them with the strings you could just use nails that'd be the cheapest but it wouldn't look very good I used a vinyl channel for mine the channel costs about $7 for 12 feet that required some drilling and maybe painting if they don't sell a color that matches your house this is a piece of the J channel with the LED string I think it looks pretty good and it does a nice job of hiding the wires you mount it so that the lights are facing down and then you've got these slots where you can put screws through into the fascia board on your house the downsides are first you have to actually drill these holes individually yourself they're 1/2 inch or about 12.5 millimeters and you need one hole every three inches the other downside this was white originally so I had to spray-paint this to match my house that was two years ago and since then they've started making it in a lot more colors so if you choose to do this hopefully you can find a color that will match your house but either way you still have to drill those holes and that takes a lot of time but if you like this look this is a good option if you go with the strip's you could use this aluminum channel with a light diffuser it looks nice and costs two to three dollars for three feet some folks have used PVC pipe and slid the LED inside of that that costs about two dollars for 10 feet I was kind of surprised to see the LEDs shine through their PVC pipe but they do it actually works pretty well if you go with the waterproof strips you may not need anything else for mounting if they have a good adhesive backing and you have a good flat clean surface to stick them to here's a breakdown I put together of the price per foot for strings and strips and different mounting options until I made this table I thought I had done a really good job of doing the cheapest method possible with my strings in j-channel after seeing this cost breakdown I bought some that are waterproof with the adhesive backing I'll put them up and see how long they last when they fall off the house I'll update the video description and let you know how long they lasted here's some examples of how the different installation methods look [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] this is just an example of a couple more mounting systems this is some of that aluminum channel with the diffuser on it this actually is really cool stuff this believe it or not is wire management tubing from Ikea and then I just stuck the LEDs inside of it and it really diffuses well it looks super cool and then this last piece is just a piece of that thin walled PVC pipe and you wouldn't think that the LEDs would shine through very well but they really do it has to be dark to really see them well but it looks nice I mean that definitely there's some places where that's gonna be the right thing to use aluminum channel with the diffuser Ikea cord management tubing and thin wall PVC let's talk for a minute about LED voltage for all practical and economical purposes all the individually addressable LED strips are 5 volts technically they're ws2812 yes there are some 12-volt options but they are either not really individually addressable like the WS 2811 which are actually trial that's word I just made up it means you don't get to tell each individual LED what color to be you get to tell three at a time what color to be they're nice and they're not too expensive but they're not individually addressed there is another newer 12-volt option for LED strips they're quite a bit more expensive those are the WS 28:15 s those are the ones that cost like $50.00 for a 12-volt string versus $15 for a 5 volt string so if you're gonna get strips get ws2812 at 5 volts the strings however do come in 5 volts or 12 volts that's because the strings are actually WS 28s but unlike the strip's the strings are individually addressable 12 volt strings are a little more expensive than 5 volt strings the difference is about $2 per 5 meter string the advantage of 12 volts is this you lose a little bit of voltage with each LED because each LED adds a little bit of resistance eventually the 5 volts that you started with have dropped too low to produce accurate colors the solution for the five volt voltage drop problem is to run a parallel set of wires from your power supply and inject power at each end of your LED strip or string all of these LED strips or strings give you wires to easily connect to for injecting power it's almost like they knew you're gonna need to do this these are the strings you can see they look like little bulbs if you look closely you can see these are 12 volts says right there 12 volts I also have some that are 5 volts they don't have a label that says 5 volts if you connect five volt lights to 12 volts you're gonna be buying some new LEDs these are the extra wires that they provide for you to inject voltage and the same goes for the strips they all have two extra wires at the beginning and the end of each string or strip of LEDs to help you inject voltage another important thing to see here is that all these LEDs are directional meaning when you connect the controller the signal that tells the LEDs what color to be travels in one direction it can't go the other way they all have arrows to tell you which way the signal needs to go so when the arrow is pointing that way you connect your controller to this end running the extra wire and making the connections to inject power will cost you about a dollar fifty per five meters that's about the same as the price difference for the 12-volt strings and those don't require any extra power injection so that means less labor for you so if you're using strings it's probably worth it to get 12 volts with strips the price difference between 12 volts and 5 volts is a lot bigger now let's talk for a minute about power supplies if you get 5 volt LEDs you need a 5 volt power supply if you get 12 volt lights you'll need a 12 volt power supply the size or a number of amps that you'll need depends on how many LEDs you plan to run from that power supply if you just do the Google you'll find recommendations for 60 milliamps per led by that ain't the whole story these LEDs are gonna be flashing and dimming and showing all sorts of colors my simple rule of thumb yeah I said simple which hasn't failed me yet is one amp per 50 LEDs so figure out where you want to put your lights which kind of lights you want to use how much length you're gonna need then figure out the total number of LEDs roughly and divide by 50 that'll give you a good estimate of how many amps you're gonna need from your power supply you can get the wall wart style those are usually one to three amps you can get these in closed corded style those are usually five to ten amps or you can get this bare metal style which can be anything from one to over 60 amps I've used some of each they all work fine so there's three kinds of power supplies you've got these kind that plug into the wall these are pretty easy to find in five or 12 volts and they're usually one to three amps if you need more than three amps you're gonna need something bigger than this the next step up is something like this these you can usually get somewhere between five and ten amps an important part about both these kinds of power supplies is that they use these barrel connectors this is one of those big bare metal power supplies this one's five volts 60 amps you have to connect it to a power cord like this and then these terminals here where you connect plus and minus for the five volts this one is a 12 volt 1 amp so these bare metal ones go all the way from one amp to 60 maybe even more these bare metal kinds will have screw terminals instead of those barrel connectors that makes it a little easier to just strip wires and connect things if you do get a power supply that uses barrel connectors you can get these sort of adapters so you can put wires in one side and it'll connect to a barrel connector like that this one has push buttons but most of them have screws by now you should have a pretty good idea of what you want your house to look like and it's all decked out in LED awesomeness the next thing to talk about is how are we gonna actually make all those fancy colors for that we're gonna use a simple three dollar controller called anode MCU and some free software called W LED this is a note MCU it's a little circuit board with a USB connector and a whole bunch of pins for connecting wires if you've never touched a circuit bored like this it's okay don't give up now stick with me I'll walk you through it you can do this it's not gonna hurt you and you're not gonna hurt it you can pick it up touch it shake it around you're not gonna break it the first step in turning this little board into an awesome LED controller is to download W LED you can just go to w LED me and then releases and the one on top will be the newest version the node M to you uses the esp8266 chip don't worry there's no test you're not gonna have to remember that but that tells you which of these files you need to download so download the file that ends with esp8266 dot bin right here save it somewhere where it'll be easy to find like your desktop next we need a program that will copy that file onto our node MCU for that we're gonna use ESP home flasher there's a version for Mac or Windows grab the one that applies to you and download it when you first start up ESP home flasher you may get a warning message that says are you sure you trust this software Mac does the same thing I promise it's safe next grab a micro USB cord is the 80-bit e1 plug it into your computer and then plug it into the note MCU board you may get a light to flash you made a light that stays on it doesn't really matter now in the ESP home flasher hit this refresh button and then hit this drop down box and you should see a comm number here now depending on what else you have connected to your computer you may see more than one of these it does a pretty good job of figuring out which one is the node MCU and putting that number at the top but don't worry if you pick the wrong one it's not gonna hurt anything it just won't work until you pick the right one so I'm gonna select my comm 29 and then you go to browse and then find the bin file that you downloaded which is right here open that and that's it now you hit flash and there goes this will take 30 seconds to a minute done flashing is complete that wasn't so bad right didn't even explode as soon as it says flash complete you're going to need a Wi-Fi connected device so a laptop or a phone or a computer that can connect to Wi-Fi look for new Wi-Fi networks and you'll find one called w LED AP connect to that so the password is w LED all lowercase then one two three four sure your browser might automatically find and connect to the W LED user interface but if it doesn't then open up the browser like Firefox or Chrome or whatever you use and in the search bar type 4.3.2 1 and hit enter and there you go you're connected to your w LED board now you could control the note MCU and the LEDs through this interface right here but most people won't want to do that so if you are most people then click Wi-Fi settings and you get this page here you need to put in your Wi-Fi name and password then go down here to this box that says HTTP and give it a name that will be easy for you to remember it's probably a good idea to give it a name here that has something to do with where you're gonna put it I'm gonna name it ders so that's what my friends call me back home is ders that's it for this page when you've done that hit save and reboot now that note MCU is going to be able to connect to your Wi-Fi so give it a minute and then in the browser type what you put in the box next to dot local you probably need to include the beginning which was HTTP colon forward slash four slash and then mine was w LED - ders de RZ dot local and there it is this is the W LED web interface you can do pretty much everything you need to here but this probably isn't where you'll do most of your led controlling probably the more common way that people are gonna want to control their lights he's using the W LED app it's free app it's available for Android or iOS go to the App Store download it when you open it up you won't see all this these are all of my W LED controllers yours will be blank to find your new node MCU with W LED on it you hit the plus in the upper right corner then discover lights give it a second to find a bunch of new lights well probably will only find one and then hit the check mark back on the front page you'll have a new entry that'll just say W LED light perfect under where it says W LED light it will also give you the IP address if putting in the name that you chose dot local didn't bring up the web user interface then typing in that IP address will so when I put that IP address up here it takes me to this interface even if that local is not working now that we've got W LED loaded on our note MCU we're ready to wire it up to the LEDs whether you're using strips or strings they both come with this kind of connector at the beginning and two extra wires for positive and negative so to connect this to this we need some extra wires these are jumpers that have a female end and a male end because we chose the note MCU we've these pins ready to go no soldering required in the lower left corner there's a pin that says V in that's where we're going to put five volts so I'm gonna use a red jumper for that one next we've got G that's for ground we're going to connect the white wire to that one and then the signal that goes from the node MCU to the LEDs to tell them what color to be connects to d4 like that now we can connect these jumpers to our strip of LEDs five volts - red white is ground and green is our data five volts ground data these two wires are where we're going to connect our power supply so get your wire strippers or your fingernails or your teeth and expose a little bit of that wire and then because I'm going to use a power adapter with a barrel connector I'm going to use this adapter red is going to be positive that's how it'll look you've got five volts and ground and data connected to V in ground and d4 you've got five volts here ground here and data in the middle and you've got it connected to a female barrel adapter sometimes the wire colors are different just different manufacturers use different colors you can always check on the LEDs themselves and it'll tell you five volts is on that side do which is data is on the inside in between the two and then ground is on the outside same here five volts on one side data in the middle and ground on the other side now with it all wired up we'll connect our power supply there we go that's not so bad if you want to make these connections more secure add some electrical tape here or hot glue and if you want to enclose everything you can use something like a soap dish drill a hole for some wires to come out and then just bundle up all this and stuff it in there something like that you get the idea I thought I'd better show you an example of how to wire up 12 volt LEDs because they are a little more complicated than 5 volt and that's because if you connect 12 volts directly to your node MCU in most cases it will go poof some of them say 12 volts is okay but for the most part you're better off using 5 volts so you don't damage it so that means you need something like this this takes 12 or up to 24 volts and converts it to 5 volts this does the same thing it's just a different style I like this one because it has the screw terminals so it makes it easy to connect wires they both output 5 volts 3 amps and the price is about the same this one might be slightly cheaper so how do you wire it up well first this 12 volt led manufacturer was kind enough to shift around the colors for us so most of the time red is gonna be your positive and white or black is going to be your negative that's not the case here if you look closely you can see 12 volts D and then ground so in this case white is the data and blue is the ground so just be mindful before you make any connections make sure you can verify which is positive which is negative and which is data so this is coming from my 12 volt power supply red is positive goes here to the input positive white is negative goes to the input negative then I've connected these voltage n wires for my LEDs to the positive and negative red being positive blue being negative now on the output side I took a couple of jumper wires cut them off strip them back a little and then connected blue to negative and red to positive on the 5 volt side red then goes to V in on the node MCU and blue goes to ground then the last wire that I have to connect is the one from d4 which is the data pin going to white on the LEDs the most important thing to know here is that you've got to have a common ground inside this box this ground is connected to this ground so this will work fine I could also just connect this blue jumper to the blue on the LEDs that would work too so then when we power it on there you go worky-worky and no smoke well that's it it's a pretty good summary to get just about anybody started with their own custom holiday LEDs but that's far from all that you can learn in the next video I'm gonna go into more detail about W LED and what you can do with the app like set different effects make your own custom effects set timers and control it with home assistant that's all for now as always thanks for watching til next time adios if you need help or want to chat with me or others who also enjoy projects like this you can find us on Facebook and discord if you like what I'm doing and you want to support me you can use my special product links in the video description or head over to patreon or just like and share my videos that's easy if you like this video and you want to see more like it this box will take you to a playlist of some of my favorites in addition to videos like this I also do live streams every Sunday this box will take you to a recording of the latest live stream that's all for now adios

Channel: DrZzs

Views: 732,805

Rating: 4.920805 out of 5

Keywords: Home Automation, Home Assistant, Sonoff, DIY, Electronics, Tasmota, Arduino, 3d printing, Christmas, Christmas Lights, leds, home automation, home assistant, hassio, wled, diy, drzzs, automation, tech, drzzzs, dr zzs, dr zzzs, hassos, home assistant automation, iot home automation, tasmota, drzzs sonoff, tech hacks, technical hacks, esp32, esp8266, iot, iot automation, esp-8266, esp-32, esphome

Id: tXvtxwK3jRk

Length: 23min 23sec (1403 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 12 2019