lights and we started looking into permanent lights. Jellyfish, Everlight and others are too expensive for my taste but in searching about them I discovered Drzzs, showed it to my 15yo son and asked him if he wanted to try it.

So we ordered a bunch of pixel lights, a NodeMCU board and went about learning how to do it. We flashed the NodeMCU with WLED easy enough and got the lights working in the living room pretty well.

Drzzs is selling some track to attach to the house that has pre-drilled holes for the pixel lights but they were all on back order.

So I found a vinyl siding j channel from a supplier in town and made my own. By this time Thanksgiving had come and gone, we were the only house of our neighbors that didn't appear to be celebrating Christmas and my little kids were letting me know about it.

We mounted the power supply, control board and voltage converter in a box in the garage and ran some 18/4 low volt wire that was meant for security systems up the wall and out into the eve to power and provide data for the lights.

The power worked fine, but data didn't. If I connected the lights directly into the control board, no problem, but I couldn't send the data signal the 8' between the board and the start of the lights. I tried a sacrificial pixel but that didn't work either. Finally I tried a 22 AWG wire and it worked like it was supposed to.
So I guess the wire can be too big to carry the data signal, I was surprised by that.

So we got the first section hung up and I brought my wife out to show her how awesome we were that we had such cool Christmas lights. She wasn't very impressed and actually laughed at me.



Over the next few very cold days, we got the lights across the rest of the garage and I called it good enough. This spring we will finish the rest when it is warmer and we have more daylight hours.

It has been a pretty fun project but I still don't really know what I'm doing.