which clips did you use

You are very welcome! There's two ways to answer your question. The first year for either the house or the church, planning and setup took most of a year to complete (doing it as a hobby during evenings and weekends). Much of the first year is spent designing the layout, planning the equipment needed, then assembling props, figuring out mounting methods, and figuring out physical placement to best match the layout. Once everything is designed and built, subsequent year setups (physical wise) is significantly less effort. The church gets setup in 5 (4-5 hour) sessions. 1) Building prop setup 2) Megatree frame setup 3) Megatree pixel setup 4) Yard prop setup and finally 5) Wiring and power. For the show at my home, setup entails these stages 1) Setup roof and house outlines 2) Install roof eave floods 3) Setup window frames and house face props 4) Setup garage door props 5) Setup P10 panels 6) Setup megatree frame 7) Setup megatree pixels 8) Setup yard props 9) Complete wiring and power. To be time efficient doing setup, I label and store everything in an organized manner. That way you don't have to hunt for a cable here or wonder how you wired things up from the previous year. As a result, physical setup planning doesn't require any pre-prep time now other than to pick a date and pull out specific bins. Most of the time spent after the first year is on sequencing music in xLights. Hope this helps.

Ni Family Lights I’m very happy with the 3” setup. Pretty much everything in the show from the house outlines, window frames, swags, and megatree are at 3” spacing. The Vine Church setup is predominantly 2” spacing for the center matrix and window outlines. You can’t go wrong either way as long as you plan other props similarly for balance across everything.

WAY2FAST4U, check out other videos in my channel to see what it looks like at night. I'm not sure what you mean by having a mess with lights on the roof. These lights go up and come back down during each season. It takes me less than half a day to get everything down at the end of the season in the middle of a cold winter.

The strips are from Boscoyo Studio. The product is the coro ChromaTrim item. They also have an ABS ChromaTrim product that is good for making roof/house/window outlines.

Thanks David. The coro trim was very easy to attach to PVC and can just as easily be attached to EMT with zip ties. You can drill PVC to do the same. After reading what it took others to do that, I didn’t have confidence in drilling holes in PVC straight and accurate. With the coro trim, it was a no brained for me given the low cost and significant time saved. For the connections, you are correct. I experimented with using auto wiring connections for my roof sections. The beginning of a run uses the standard pigtail associated with the lights. For inter run segment pieces, those are 3 pin auto clip connectors. I didn’t show in detail, but for the gutter swags, I’m using 6 pin auto clip connectors. Along a gutter section, the horizontal lines are connected to each other going one way. Then at the end of the line, the pixel data run returns back through the inverted arches (aka swags). So, the single 6 pin connector lets me plug once to connect both directional runs. I have had one clip break during disassembly one year due to the cold weather. But I continue to use it and the rest with no issues now, going on the 5th year.

Thanks for the comment. You got me thinking for a minute. I'm not sure it is that much work using Coro given that the items are up on the roof for 3 months. The beauty of the Coro solution is that it is very light and needs no painting -- easy weight wise on the edge of the roof, easy to carry up and down from the roof, and easy to store. This is the 4th year using those props, and there's no indication that I'll need replace anything for another 2-3 more years -- which if anything would be to replace the pixels due to excessive epoxy yellowing from UV light exposure. Having drilled holes out from aluminum bar stock for the controller builds, I'm not sure how easy it will be to accurately hand drill out holes from angle iron. If you have the means to accurately drill out each hole, go for it. You will need to rust prime and paint the angle iron for appearance - which may need to be touched up every year. Another potential challenge is that the pixels have a notch in them for seating into props. Angle iron would be thicker than the notch and could be problematic getting the hole size just right. If the hole is too small, the pixels won't seat right. Too large and the pixels won't stay in place. CoroCoro is about $38.40 for the PVC and $44 for the CoroTrim Boscoyo product ($1.10 for each 4' long piece). The PVC and Coro total cost is $82.4 vs $533. Granted, the PVC/Coro method uses a bunch of zip ties (maybe $10 worth), the angle iron method would require rustoleum and paint. Regardless of the way you build your props, all ways will take time. And in the end, you can be proud of what you created. Best of luck.

I’m sorry to tell you that the swags aren’t available anywhere. I cut those by hand from 4x8 sheets of 4mm coro.

@@NiFamilyLights very nice work sir!!

Sorry, no, I don’t miss C9s. All the pixels used are bullet or square WS2811 standard 12V pixels.

vixxan, the risers have a 1/4" hole drilled near the base. I ran a zip tie through the sides of the ridge vent and the hole in the base of the riser. It's just to keep them from moving as a backup. The risers have a decent amount of weight and when connected to each other with the metal bars, they're likely not to go anywhere even without the zip tie.

@CaptCrewSocks, I don't have first hand experience with pixel strings with vinyl siding, but I've heard folks have good success with using some sort of J-channel that can slip behind sections of vinyl siding to support mounting pixels and vertically and horizontally.

Glad to hear this video is helpful for you. I'm not at all worried about wind. The risers are actually much heavier than they look. And as a safety precaution, I do have zip ties holding them to the ridge vent on the front and back side. They won't be going anywhere.

Alan, you are correct that it’s best to have all your pixels facing towards the viewer. The amount of light coming off the side is significantly less than face on. I had converted a spiral led trees to pixels by zip tying the pixels along the spiral loops. It was in my show the first year but they didn’t have the color pop since half the pixels were facing the wrong way and another quarter of the pixels were facing sideways. The effects didn’t have the appeal I was expecting from the xLights rendering. For the roof lights, I couldn’t think of an easier way to have the side pixels facing forward. But they are all consistent and don’t seem to impact the roof outline from the viewer. Downward facing pixels could have the added benefit of reflecting some color off the house. So, if you do that, you can factor that into your sequencing.

Ralph, thanks for the comment. I believe it’s never too late to learn something new, so congrats to you for evolving your setup. I understand your desire to maintain the C9 look, it’s definitely distinctive. I have seen places where you can print or purchase C9 covers that fit over pixel bulbs. I’d go that route. What I would recommend is getting all clear/frosted/white covers. Although they won’t look as festive during the day, when you use them at night, you can make them any color you want. Otherwise, the colored covers will limit what you can do with them at night. Regarding spacing, every other hole of a pixel strip is just 2” or so. For you to keep the classic C9 look, I’d make that 3-4 holes apart which standard pixel spacing should work. If you order custom pixel lengths, anything 4”-8” spacing would I think have more of the classic look. However, you would need to purchase custom pixels with wire length between the pixels to account for the longer space between pixels. Last, regarding the ground stakes, I was able to find some alternatives on Amazon. I’ll post a link following this comment. Best of luck!

Here’s a link to the ground stakes. www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B08H4DZCV4/ref=sspa_mw_detail_0?ie=UTF8&psc=1&pd_rd_i=B08H4DZCV4p13NParams

@@NiFamilyLights Thanks for the info I am so sorry for some reason I am not getting notified when I get replies from you I have to see why. but thanks so much. so you said you know peps who can make or sell the pixel cap covers and yes totally agree with you about it, I have had a crazy year and I'm in stress out time already really behind, I'm a wedding dj and all the moved covid weddings are hitting now plus my normal booked weddings so since like may its just been unreal, im holding my eyes open right now just to get you my reply,lol so a few years ago Darrell sent me some of his last stakes but they have a much different top to it rather the what i call the packman top....you know what i mean right, so id really like to find someone who has and makes that top,

These pixels are only up on the roof for 4 months of the year in the fall/winter. It's been 4 years so far, and I've had no issues. The wiring quality hasn't seemed to be degrading so time will tell. If I left them up all year round, that would be a different story.

Check out other videos from my channel (sjn6a98) to see how it looks at night.

Yes, everything is left out in the elements rain, snow, or shine. The show also runs regardless of the weather.

Yes, that's correct. They point up on the roof edge because that's the direction that faces the viewers from the street.

The product is from Boscoyo Studio, and it’s called ChoroTrim. It comes in white and black. I use the white color for the vertical house outlines since my house is white, and I use black for the roof. This product is zip tied to 1/2” PVC. They have another product which is a little sturdier which is made of HDPE plastic instead of coro. I’ve used that material successfully at the church light show, zip tied to 1/2” EMT.

Kenny, that's a question very dependent on what you're working with and what you'd like to do. You'll need to consider how far your viewer is from your show, how much area you need to cover, and what you'd like the show to look like. For my show, most everything is spaced at 3". All the house outlines, window outlines, megatree, and mini trees are 3" spaced. You'll want to be sure you balance our the placement of your pixels to get broad coverage, balance, and some sense of symmetry. Best of luck to you.

The 3D printed clips are PETG. This is the 4th year using the same clips. They do get dry and brittle. So, some have broken and been replaced but many are still working great. PETG is better for outdoor use as it's better against UV damage than PLA or other filaments (so I've been told).

@@NiFamilyLights what gauge .060?

@@kp3646 The wire is supposedly 18awg. However, if I were to measure against other wire representing true thicknesses, it's probably more like 20awg or 22awg.

I’m not sure what specifically you are asking that I bought. I do have links to items shown in the video. They are in the video description.

Joe, the pixels I use are 12V regulated WS2811 bullet pixels. A subset of the pixels are square node pixels (main difference is the packaging underneath. Other options are 12V resistor based pixels. The resistor based pixels are slightly less expensive, use less power, and are more resistant to having data corruption issues. If you are in the US, many US vendors sell them. Just be sure to pick and stick with a single type of pigtail. The current standard carried by all vendors is XConnect. My pixels are older and have different pigtail ends. Not at all a comprehensive list, but check out Wally’s Lights, Yourpixelstore, Wired Watts, and DIYLEDExpress. My pixels are from DIYLEDExpress, purchased in 2017 and 2018.

@@NiFamilyLights Thank you for the kind response...

The pixels in my show are all 12V pixels from DIYLedExpress. They are pretty standard WS2811 bullet nodes, 18awg wire, 4” spacing. You can get them from any number of vendors.