Modular Light Sticks + Grid for Holiday Lighting

Just finished a holiday build for my yard. I wanted something flexible, modular, doesn’t require getting on the roof, and that was a little different than my neighbors who are all getting permanent lights under their eaves. It’s got a 10 x 25 grid in the middle with 5 lighted poles on either side for a total of 500 pixels. It stands 7 feet tall in the yard and can be seen a quarter mile down the street. Neighbors (claim to) love it! I get a lot of comments about the countdown to Christmas in particular. Borrowed a couple patterns from the community, and wrote several of my own. Have ideas for more, especially to take advantage of that tight grid in the middle, but they may need to wait until next year.

Give it a watch on YouTube

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Love it! How did you do your countdown font? 2D array / character map?

This looks amazing. The expertise and creativity in this community is impressive.

Makes me realize how basic my thought process has been approaching this. Hopefully someday ill manage to learn enough to do stuff like this.

Thank you for sharing.

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Yes, essentially. I just have an array with 4x7 coordinates for pixels in each character all starting at 0,0 in the upper left corner. And a separate set of coordinates for the upper left corner of each character position on the board. Then I just add them together on render.

You could also try the morphing antialiased digits from here …

Oh that’s pretty cool. Too bad none of my characters change in real time — morphing them would be neat.