Holiday Pixel Zone

As long as I can remember, I always loved the houses that went all out at Christmas with lights and decorations — the ones you would drive around the neighborhood to see. They just make people happy! I always decorated the bushes with lights, but never went all out…until I went down a rabbit hole into the light show hobby.

A few years back, I decided to ditch my “old fashioned” LED Christmas lights that were a mismatch of different brands / shapes that I accumulated as older ones failed. I thought it would be cool to get some “smart lights” that I had seen online and in big box stores — these were Twinkly brand, which really brought the idea of programmable RBG lights (any bulb can be any color) to the regular consumer. So I bought some during an Amazon Prime Day sale and started fooling around with them. They worked great as Twinkly intended with their own app, but I quickly discovered they could be made to do A LOT more if you went outside of the Twinkly ecosystem. For a couple of years my show was 100% Twinkly as I kept buying more of their stuff. Twinkly is great for many things, but there are some limitations if you’ve gone down the rabbit hole of holiday light shows. That led to figuring out generic “pixels” (which is what the pros generally use) and integrating my shows with both Twinkly and Pixels at the same time. Over this time, I’ve figured out a bunch of stuff mostly through reading/watching the internet and trial & error. Hopefully some of the knowledge I’ve earned will help someone on their way to building light shows for everyone to enjoy!