About Our Light Show

Oak Hills Lights is a free light/multimedia show for our community.

We started with more-conventional Christmas lights and decorations in 2017, and added a small string of LED “pixels” as a fence along our driveway in 2019 as a test. We ran our first full LED pixel light show in 2020 with about 7000 pixels (lights). Each year we add more pixels, display elements (props), and musical sequences.

Wolf runs a blog called Lunar Den Lights with more technical information about our show and projects related to it. The site also includes terminology and resource references for anyone interested in learning more about this hobby.

2023 Show Statistics:

  • 34,069 pixels (individual lights able to display millions of colors) consisting of:
    • 17,173 LED pixel module “bulbs”.
    • 16,896 LED pixels in 24 “P10” and 6 “P5” sign matrix panels.
  • Two projected video matrixes of 57,600 virtual pixels each, 115,200 total.
  • 447,807 control channels, managed by 12 controllers (special computers).
  • Each pixel receives new color and brightness data up to 40 times each second.
  • From Thanksgiving to New Years we expect to use a (whopping) $25 of electricity. 😊

Trivia:

  • We run almost all of our LEDs at 20% brightness to minimize impact on our neighbors and our operating costs.
  • With a few exceptions, most of our LEDs run on 5v DC.
  • Just one of our video projectors uses more power than all of the LED pixels combined.
  • Our largest single prop, consisting of 2400 individual pixels, is our “Mega Tree”.
  • Our smallest single prop, consisting of only 5 individual pixels, is one of our pixel stakes. There are 180 of them though (900 pixels). 😊

Please see our Q&A page for frequently asked questions and answers.