DIY Christmas lights upgrade

well it’s that time of the year again time to get christmas lights ready before the snow falls but first I’ll check in on the existing lights from last year they’ve been up there all summer because you know I’m lazy like that and they all still work which is a good sign i have to get up there and re-secure some of them that’s not a big deal but i am going to uh pull them down and make a bit of an upgrade on them just so that they’re a little bit more visible from a distance let’s check in on the control box too it’s also been sitting out here all summer well for like a full 12 months actually not a drop of water inside there excellent no reason to do anything there I’m glad those christmas lights survived their ordeal being outside for a full 12 months plus a little bit through full-on Canadian winter so down to minus 35-ish and up to i think we got over plus 30 celsius in the summer and heat and rain and everything else but i think I’m going to do a little bit of an upgrade on them so I’ve gone up on the ladder and pulled them down off the roof so that i can work on them down here in the workbench rather than up there because that just seems janky and dangerous up there so I’ve got them all down here I’ve got all the clips with them so hopefully they can just go back in the same spot they don’t have to faff around with that up on the ladder because that was kind of awkward last year anyway so the upgrade that i’m going to make on these and i think i mentioned it earlier is i printed off uh well i spent some time learning cad and then printed off these little guys that should just slip right on over there and glow with the light so that you’ve got a traditional bulb shape rather than just a little point of a point of light up on the side of the house so to experiment with this just as i was designing this uh obviously i wasn’t going to go up and down on top of the house but i do have some more of these lights uh and this little board that i got from these guys uh so i want to get this right because i gave the wrong name in the in the previous video where i introduced this thing this thing is officially called the Renard plus esp wi-fi pixel controller um the software that runs on the esp itself is called wi-fi pixel stick so just just wanted to get that straight to make sure that uh if you’re looking for this little board here you can find it it’s an esp8266-01 there’s a standard one right there it’s running uh some software called esp pixel stick and it uh and this board interfaces that with the string of lights uh provide some voltage regulation and whatnot makes it a whole uh simple little uh package so 5 volts in there you could put 12 volts in if you put a regulator the 12 volt regulator on there and then the three wires out to the string and the little esp does the wi-fi and controls everything so i’m just going to use that for testing here right on the bench and as you can see i’ve been experimenting with how to attach these things this is heat shrink tubing designed for going around 18650s so it shrunk down quite a bit there and that seems to be holding mostly this is just black electrical tape but what i’m actually going to be using is this half inch heat shrink tubing that i got from princess auto obviously you get it from any local supplier but this shrinks down two to one it’s 10 feet long not sure why they are labeling it in imperial measurements but whatever and this stuff shrinks at between 725 celsius the 3d printing filament melts at about 200 degrees well 180 or so so i’ve got some range to play in there so i can shrink that down without melting this i’m pretty sure it’ll hold on but i noticed that uh these printed in the light gray pla don’t really oh you see a little bit of a glow in there but not much so i was delayed a little bit until i could get some translucent or transparent natural filament and i think that shows up a lot better i hope anyways then again the black shrink around that base there so i think in the dark outside that’s going to show up pretty well certainly better than that standard gray so after that filament showed up i spent some time printing a whole bunch of them i’ve got 146 of them in there and i think there’s about 138 on my string that goes on the house i hope i counted right so i think if i do about a centimeter worth of heat shrink which is two of those lines um i should be able to get a good shrink down on there sort of uh five millimeters above and below so let’s uh give that a try let’s put that over there and that down over there but like that sure there i think that’ll look pretty good especially in the dark i wonder if people will even be able to tell that it’s not a traditional bulb if i’ve got these on a solid pattern i think that’s gonna work so i’ll just repeat that about 138 times but on the string that came in from outdoors not on this one you may have noticed that i changed methods a couple of times and this seemed to be the smoothest way i was using this uh northwest shoreline chopper for a while but with the groove underneath the blade this soft material kind of moved out of the way this thing’s not really made for that it’s made more for chopping uh model railroad lumber and rigid styrene and stuff like that but it’s really cool for that if you need to make a bunch of repeated cuts just set the stop and go but that wasn’t cutting it for me plugging the pun so i ended up just with this and i have gouged up this little area on my cutting mat here so oh that’s what it’s for and now time consuming thing part two hmm what is the easiest way to do that slide that over there slide that on nice tight fit and slide that up and then shrink 150 130 sometimes so and that is the last one yay so tomorrow i will uh when it’s light outside i will get up on the ladder and put these guys back up in the house and see how they look hmm 23 left and i made 147 of them my brain is fried i can’t even do that math so i’ve got 124 weights in this string okay which also means i’ve got a bunch of these things left over and i’ve got two strings or string and a half of these so i might actually i’ll probably have to print some more of these to finish that but i might actually do that that’ll be about 75 or so um i might put that on the tree in front of the house too you never know anyway i’ll come back to you tomorrow my tomorrow your bike and there we go with it on the house um i should have done this bit of video earlier but uh so be it it’s quite dark and uh yeah it looks pretty good let me just put a different uh pattern on there that’s kind of cool and these are all the same patterns as last uh the last time you saw these i just think it looks better with the larger bulbs on it well that was a fairly time consuming project on my site i’m not sure how exciting it was for you guys but uh maybe there’s uh something interesting in there for you i’m going to put the stl for these bulb covers on i don’t know i guess my google drive and i’ll link that down below um in case anybody has these kind of strings and wants to print something off like that i don’t know how useful that’ll be but uh there you go i may print a bunch more of these and add a add another string to these things and put them up on the tree in front of the house pending of course wife approval because all decorating projects must go through that approval process anyway um hope you found something interesting in here or at least i didn’t waste too much your time comments questions down below as usual i’ll talk to you later .