Your First Year of Animated Lighting
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Before you jump into the lake wearing lead overshoes, it's a good idea to know how deep the water is, first. Through the goodness of our members, we conducted a poll to find out what kinds of problems they encountered in 2016 for the expressed purpose of adding this information to the Wiki for beginners. This is the summary of that poll and you can read the comments they posted by going to the thread itself: http://www.diychristmas.org/vb1/showthread.php?7221-Taking-Stock-of-2016
Here are the overall results of 100 poll participants:
- 17% of the respondents said they had ZERO problems. That's roughly 1 in 6. It's not the greatest odds, but it's an encouraging figure! But a beginner should understand that this is not the norm, even for experienced DIYers. Therefore, you should always expect that you will likely be tinkering with your display to either get it to run or keep it running.
- The kind of lights you decide to use makes a difference as to the scope of problems you're likely to have. Incandescent/mini-lights are still popular and generally are the least problematic, followed by strings or strips of LEDs and lastly, the smart pixels. One could say that pixels are 400% more problematic than incandescents, and twice as problematic as strings/strips of LEDs. This is why most experienced DIYers would encourage beginners to start simple and grow into the more complicated lighting products after you've acquired some experience instead of starting out with pixels. You've been forewarned.
