A lot of neighborhood displays stop at a few strings along the eaves. Ethan Ingalls has taken the opposite path, growing this setup over five years into a full pixel show that covers a two-story house and the snowy yard around it. The latest year alone brought four leaping arches and more than 1200 new pixels, a serious jump for a single season.
Under the hood, a Raspberry Pi 3 B+ runs the Falcon Player as the scheduler, with the sequences built in Xlights. A Falcon F16v3 pixel controller, expandable to 48 ports, drives the pixels, and a Smart Receiver satellite out in the yard handles the tree and the arches. Two LOR 16-channel 120V AC controllers work alongside, and audio passes through a Fosi Audio USB DAC, mixer and headphone amp out to a Signtek FM transmitter. The 1565 WS2811 pixels come in both 12V and 5V versions, adding up to 4695 DMX channels plus 27 LOR channels.
The centerpiece is a 15-foot mega tree the maker built, holding 800 nodes arranged 16 by 50 with a 90-node star on top, using pixnode strip and topper parts from a specialty vendor. The arches follow a 6-foot coro pattern from another designer and were assembled along a tutorial. Reindeer are the only incandescent bulbs left in the display. Lit snowflakes fill the upper windows, and a lighted wreath hangs above the garage.
One choice stands out to me: everything runs at full brightness for extra light and wider dynamic range in the sequencing. Reliability looks strong as well, with only 2 pixel failures out of 1000 reported since last year. Budgets have tightened, with pixel prices up 50% since 2020 and the mega tree costing about $400 before the central controller. The total spend across the whole display has not been shared. That is the one open question I would most want answered.
Project by Ethan Ingalls. Watch it on their YouTube channel: