When it comes to custom Christmas light shows, there's no board better suited for the job than the Raspberry Pi. The community support and vast amount of open source tools make it an ideal go-to option for many makers looking to design something from scratch with as much control as possible. Today, we've got an incredible DIY project to share created by the YouTube channel Break It Yourself. Using our favorite SBC, they've not only decorated their own house in a dazzling light display but took things further by running a light show across the whole neighborhood block!
According to Break It Yourself, each holiday they've always enjoyed driving around looking for extravagant light displays and knew it would be something they wanted to do for their own home each year as an adult. However, it was always incredible to come across a neighborhood with lots of lights, rather than just one house. This led to the idea this year which was to incorporate 16 houses in a custom coordinated light show.
The Break It Yourself house has quite a few light features but the neighborhood has been unified with his creation of custom LED candy canes. These line the edges of everyone's yard down the block, immersing drivers in synchronized lights on either side as they drive down the street. The candy canes communicate wirelessly and are powered by extension cords so all the neighbors really needed to provide to participate was permission while Break It Yourself took on all the labor and power costs.
Break It Yourself explains that the main board synchronizing everything is a Raspberry Pi 4. However, the display at his house incorporates much more than just candy canes. The biggest feature on their home is a powerful projector that has custom animations that dance across a series of roller shades. These shades can also be programmed to raise and lower automatically at night for the light show.
While we don't have access to the source code, Break It Yourself does a great job explaining how everything is connected and communicates. We also have confirmation that the Raspberry Pi is running Falcon Player (FPP), an open source tool designed for synchronizing LEDs with a Pi as the main controller.
If you want to get a closer look at this Raspberry Pi project in action and learn more about its construction, check out the full video over at the official Break It Yourself YouTube channel.
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Ash Hill is a contributing writer for Tom's Hardware with a wealth of experience in the hobby electronics, 3D printing and PCs. She manages the Pi projects of the month and much of our daily Raspberry Pi reporting while also finding the best coupons and deals on all tech.
He thinks his giant elevated birdhouse is the eyesore. This kind of selfishness makes neighbors hate you, and medically harms people with certain kinds of light pattern sensitivities.
