After three years of procrastination, I finally installed holiday lights on my house – really, winter lights since I’d like to keep them lit through the dark gloomy days to bring a little extra cheer to the neighborhood.

The idea was to have a strip of LEDs along the eaves of my house, outlining the roofline with a  programmable strip of lights that could be Christmas themed, New Years, or whatever cool pattern I felt like putting up there.

I bought a PixelBlaze v3 which was just sitting around for the longest time.  Finally this year I got these “neon” LED lights with diffuser from Amazon and decided to really do it.

I picked 24V lights to help minimize the voltage drop since I am powering it through the Cat6 cables I had wired to every corner of the house during my remodel.  There are two jacks in each location so I can use one for a camera and one to bring power and the control signal to the lights.

The LED strips come with mounts like this that are meant to fix the strip to a surface perpendicularly:

But for my application, I wanted to screw into the wooden soffit and have the LEDs face forward, so I needed a right angle clip.  I rolled my own 3D model which I printed in PETG in two parts, so the upper part would print in brown to blend with the soffit material, while the lower part prints in white to blend with the stucco face of the wall.

I was able to reuse a 24V Meanwell power supply that I bought for a previous home backup battery project, and created cables to go from the power supply to RJ45, and RJ45 to the JST 3-pin connector on the LED strips.  For the outside connection I used heatshrink tubing to do my best to make the connection weatherproof; it’s protected under the eave from direct rain, but I might need to improve the waterproofing later on.

My first iteration of the LED strip clips was a little too fragile, so I beefed up the thickness and the joint between the two pieces.  I’ll replace the clips after the current storm ends, and also add in more clips to keep the strip from sagging too much between them.

Here’s “first light” on v0.1:

The plan is to have the lights trace around the soffits on the whole house (except the walkway between my house and the neighbor, where it wouldn’t be seen except through their bedroom window).  I have another PixelBlaze on order; I think I’ll probably want multiple controllers because there are two disconnected roof lines on the house.