Most holiday light props around here are flat panels, strings draped over a tree frame, or a simple spinner. Two fully three dimensional 16x16x16 pixel cubes are a different animal entirely, and that is what Tyler Zavala has put together for a Christmas display. The cubes use vertical LED strings mounted on a dark frame, with snowflake decorations along the top, sitting alongside a large conical mega tree and a house outlined in lights.
The construction side is where this gets serious. Each cube carries 4096 pixels, plus 480 null pixels that go unused, and both cubes together total 8192 pixels with 960 null pixels. The build runs on WLED controllers with XLights handling sequencing, and it relies on seed pixels. The maker reports the whole thing took over 200 hours, and there is a fun bit of history here: back in school, a much smaller cube was built from multicolor 5mm LEDs, roughly 5 by 5 inches. The new versions are 5 by 5 feet, quite a jump in scale.
Several choices stand out. Brightness sits at 60 out of 256, and the lights shift between red, blue, green, and white in coordinated patterns. To my eye that low setting seems like a sensible pick for a display this dense, though that is only my own read of it. The maker is happy with how the cubes turned out, and after that kind of hour count that is well earned.
One thing remains open. The cubes were actually built last year but only recently started working, since multiple issues kept everything from being finished in time. A strand on the mega tree still has a problem being fixed, and the full build video will only go up once that is sorted. The maker also would not recommend others attempt this build, and given the effort involved that seems like fair advice.
Project by Tyler Zavala. Watch it on their YouTube channel: