For 2023, we added the infamous ‘8ft Pumpkin Stack’ from Home Depot.
With us being us, we decided to replace all of the Orange LED lights inside with Pixels!!
We used the popular-for-2023 ‘pebble’ style pixels to achieve this:
You can purchase these on Amazon or any of the US Pixel Suppliers.
Amazon Link: https://www.amazon.com/paulzhang-WS2811-1000LEDS-Courtyard-Decoration/dp/B0CDWLNV25?th=1
Please note: We are not affiliated nor sponsored by any of the below, these are highly-recommended vendors in the Holiday Lighting industry and are US-based. These vendors tend to go direct to the manufacturer to make improvements (such as high-gauged wire and QC Batch# requirements)
YourPixelStore: https://yourpixelstore.com/product/pebble-lights-pre-sale/
WallysLights: https://wallyslights.com/collections/12v-pixels/products/12v-ws2811-200ct-seed-pixels-strand
In order to make this work properly, we had to remove the yellow backing inside of each pumpkin, remove all of the preexisting Orange LEDS, and hot-glue in the pebble pixels. You can see a gallery of the progress below.
In the last image, you can see that we had to spray paint the insides BLACK also – this is to prevent light bleed through the actual pumpkins.
Here’s a test video – and you can see when we display RED, it shined right through the pumpkin, hence the later-added black spray paint!
In front of the LEDs, we placed beef netting / cheese cloth so we have a neutral WHITE color for the RGB LEDs to shine through.
The pumpkins are fed with 3 Data/Power feeds; 2 for the 1st pumpkin (Outline / Face – Outline is also connected to Pumpkin #2) and 1 for the top 3 pumpkins. So wiring looks like this:
PORT 1: PUMPKIN 1 FACE
PORT 2: PUMPKIN 1 OUTLINE / PUMPKIN 2
PORT 3: PUMPKIN 3 / 4 / 5
Then using Xlights, we created separate Eyes / Mouth / Nose submodels so we can individually change colors/cascade/strobe each.
The finished product! Unfortunately we ran out of time to film the show this year – but we will definitely have videos next year!!