You can make your own custom Christmas lights that are just the right length for your home. These video guides, tips, and projects will help you to create a festive light show that is sure to impress your neighbors.
1. Custom-Length Christmas Lighting
When you want to outline parts of your house with Christmas lights, what if the strings are too long for your home’s dimensions? In that case, for a neat finish, you’ll want to shorten your holiday lights to get an exact fit.
Master electrician Sparky Izzy offers a wealth of knowledge in this video guide to the process of getting your Christmas lights to fit. He advises buying strands without the bulbs inserted—known as empty socket light lines. Place them where you want on the house and then cut off the excess. Add a male plug on the end of the strand, to connect to a female plug on a standard jump cord to the power—or even another light string if the first was too short.
You can then screw in the correct size light bulbs for the sockets on the strings, typically C7 or C9, before installing them on the outside of your home. Sparky Izzy uses hot glue to stick his light sockets firmly to brick walls; he says they’ll stay up for the whole holiday season, yet are easy to remove with little to no damage.
Other useful tips include adding labels to the light strings to show where they should fit onto key points of the house, such as the apex of the roof, making them easier to reinstall next holiday season.
2. Custom Light Strands for Rain Gutters
The Lawn Care Nut knows a lot about lawns, but also Christmas lights! In this video he shows how to cut custom Christmas light strands for rain gutters to outline your roofline. Like Sparky Izzy, he prefers using empty socket light line and then screwing in the LED Christmas light bulbs later.
In this video, he shows how to attach your light stands to rain gutters with Elite plastic clips that go around the bulbs and secure them firmly. First, he measures the gutter and then cuts the light strand to the exact length to fit, for a neat finish. A handy tip is to cut the wire at an angle to prevent rainwater getting in there when you attach a male plug on the end of the strand.
3. C7 vs. C9 Light Bulbs
Two of the most popular bulb types for custom Christmas lights are C9 and C7, but what’s the difference? Eric from Christmas Lights Etc explains all in this comparison. He looks at key aspects such as shape (“C” stands for candle-shaped) and size.
The smaller C7 bulbs are commonly used for outdoor shrubs and bushes, or smaller residences, as they’re not too big. The larger C9 bulbs are commonly used for lighting rooflines, tall trees, or walkways.
The bulbs also have different-size screw-in bases: E12 for the C7 bulbs, E17 for C9. So you need to ensure they fit the stringer sockets on your custom-length Christmas light lines.
4. Control Christmas Lights With a Raspberry Pi
For a really impressive outdoor light show, you may want to control your Christmas lights with amicrocontroller board or single-board computer. A popular choice for this purpose is theRaspberry Pi, which comes in a range of models.
Here, Tom from Tom’s Tech Show explains how to control your Christmas lights with a Raspberry Pi. While you could use the Pi’s GPIO pins, Tom instead connects the Pi via a USB cable to a relay board that can switch individual light strings on and off—he uses separate strands for white, red, green, and blue. Useful links under the video include a wiring diagram and all the computer code on Bitbucket.
5. Christmas Light Show With Addressable RGB LED Strings
An alternative to using standard bulbs for outdoor Christmas lighting is to use strings or strips of addressable RGB LEDs that can be lit in any color. In this project, by the Geek Den, an Arduino microcontroller board is programmed using theFastLED libraryto control LED light strings which cover the outlines of a house.
One key advantages of using RGB LED bulbs is that they make it simpler to wire up a house for a multicolored light show: you only need single strands of RGB lights rather than having to add three (red, green, blue) or four (with white) single-color strands to cover each area.
6. Color Wash Your Home
An alternative to regular strings of Christmas lights is to use addressable RGB LED strips that can be cut to any length, simply by making a slice between any two LEDs on the strip.
In this example, RGB LED strips have been installed along the underside of the roofline. They are so bright that they color-wash the walls below, creating an animated downlighting effect. In this case, a smartphone app is used to control the lights, but you can also wire standard addressable RGB LED strips to a microcontroller or single-board computer and code your own custom animations.
7. Christmas Light Show With Projection Mapping
Taking it one step further, you could enhance your Christmas lighting by beaming animated scenes onto your home walls with a projector. A powerful “short throw” projector is typically used from around 20 to 30 feet away to cover the whole front of a house.
Rather than simply projecting a standard movie or animated scene, however, you’re able to make it look far more spectacular with “projection mapping”. This technique involves tweaking animations or videos so that they map onto real physical features of the building such as doors and windows; this can result in some stunning optical illusions. You may need to add screens or sheets to make the projections look more vivid.
8. Sync Christmas Lights to Music
The ultimate step is to sync your custom Christmas lights to music. The good news is that it’s not quite as complicated as you might think.
Sequencing software running on a computer—such as Vixen, Light-O-Rama, or xLights—controls the light strings. First, you tell the software the shape of your house and where the lights are situated. You can then program them along a timeline, syncing the lighting effects with key points in your chosen music track.
For the finest control and best effects, you should use addressable RGB lights where each pixel can be adjusted individually. In this case, one or more single-board computers or microcontrollers are connected between the lights and the main computer.
Create Your Own Custom Christmas Lights
Now you know the basics, you may go ahead and start creating your own custom Christmas light show for your home. Whichever methods you choose, it’s not as difficult as you might expect, and you can create something spectacular for the holidays.
