Photos when you get it up or it didn’t happen. 
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I love this - I have the lights and my son’s custom controller, but I need to get off my butt and get the J-channel drilled. Great motivator. Your jig gives me some ideas.
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I would take a look at the ws2812 pebble lights also, they are easy to handle and can be stretched between two points (IE to make a megatree). Just ordered a spool to build one.
Oooh, nice. Definitely could be fun to wrap all of the lawn shrubbery in those!
Anyone figured out a way to make cost effective, low profile, power efficient, smooth continuous light bar appearance for a Tron like style rather than individually spaced pixels?
Would be neat to clad parts of the house with discreet Tron like light bars for various festive and sports occasions. Something like…
Previously used 85% transparent diffuser panels for a bathroom project, but didn’t like how much depth overall assembly needed.
Recently saw some smooth light panels at HomeDepot, this topic got me considering doing tear down for ideas.
Previously, have seen light panels (I opened up…) with diffusion lens also use mylar/reflective film internally, and an intermediate layer of edge lit acrylic with etched patterns lasered/milled on the face to help direct and scatter light too.
LED neon light - Things You’ve Made - V1 Engineering Forum
100Ft LED Neon Rope Lights, Music Sync Waterproof IP65 Outdoor/Indoor RGB Strip | eBay
No idea how you’d control them and maybe doesn’t meet the other criteria but seems reasonably cheap and meets the continuous, lowish profile criteria.
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I bought one of those COB strips, they don’t have the individual lights either.
Let me know if you want the STLs for the jig.
The LEDs I currently have on my house end up looking like the above because of the diffuser.
Here’s the post with the picture of the house
This is the U-channel I used with the diffuser
And this is the LED strip I used.
They have some I think that have the LEDs even closer together and would make even more of the ‘light bar’ look.
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If you don’t care to have individually addressable LEDs, buying some badly manufactured fiber optic cable could work well. Control a color changing laser at each end to get different effects.
Glowing Fiber Optic Lighting |Corning Fibrance Light-Diffusing Fiber | Corning
I originally went with some WS2815 strips in the front on the house. They were IP65 versions, even encased in an aluminum channel with a plastic diffuser over top. They looked good for a couple seasons, but the strips would die out or not work very well. Soldering replacement strips on a ladder was no fun and eventually I gave up.
Fast forward to just a few weeks ago. I got a deal on some Govee Permanent Outdoor Pro Lights and decided to give those a go. I’m really happy with how these look.
I did not trust the 3M tape to be enough to hold each light up so I printed brackets for each LED. I also didn’t think I could get the wire to lay flat and consistently to look good. There are pre-made tracks for these, but those are twice as much as what I paid for just the lights. Instead I bought some vinyl undersill trim, cut the nail strip off with a table saw, and slid the wires in there. I modified the bracket model to accommodate the new channels I had created.
The Govee app leaves much to be desired, but it’s fine for now. I can easily make an adapter that plugs inline to make these controllable through WLED. I may do that down the road, but we’ll see how this season goes.
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Your post is actually quite hilarious to me. You and I went down the same path and I’m basically just DIY’ing the Govee setup. I do plan on mounting my J-Channel so you can see the pixels poking out under the edge of the eave and not just the light shining on the house.
This is the cheapy set I got at costco. Need to get another set to finish the rest of the way around the house.
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Would the leds Ryan used in his V1 sign work for that? I guess they were not addressable… And that may not be cost effective, depending on the size of your project.
9100 steps.
3000 trips to the shop
200 swear words
5.5 hours
The new LEDs are on the house and the old ones are pulled off. No power injection right now except the halfway point. The two wled controllers are set up as DDP so the first controller runs both halves of the house.
I’ll get pictures after dark.
Now to work on rebuilding the power supply I use to run all our blow up ornaments.
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Lights. Porch lights are just Kasa bulbs. I was too lazy to turn them off before taking the picture.
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Oh that looks great! All the work was worth it.
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Anyone hooked their led lights up to Home Assistant? Seems very plug and play, with espHOME!
Yeah I have the kids bedroom lights - which are 2 WLED controlled strips connected to home assistant.
Got presets for waking up, daytime, story time and nightlight and a 4 way ikea button outside the door.
The Storytime preset also has a a timer built in so they have a bit of reading in bed time before the lights dim to night light mode.
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Wled instances are detected by homeassistant (or did i have to install a plugin first; don’t exactly know anymore).
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