Giant Pumkpin/Giant Ornament
This is one of the stars of the show!
Materials list:
- Pair of Glowbe Hubs (https://pixelparadiseusa.com/product/iglow%ef%b8%8f-hub-pex/)
- 12 – straight sticks of 1″ x 10′ PEX (do not use coiled it will twist)
- 6 – 5 meter HD RGB strips (https://pixelparadiseusa.com/product/hd-12v-5-meter-led-strip/)
- 4′ galvanized pipe with threads on both ends (I used 3/4″, you may want to use 1″ – make sure flanges match)
- Union Coupler
- 2″ & 8″ threaded pipe extentions
- 2 flanges to screw the pipe into and bolts to attach flanges to hubs
Build instructions: You will need 2 people, this is not possible to do alone.
- Bolt the flanges onto the Glowbe hubs
- Screw galvanized pipe to the flanges making sure the holes in the hubs line up. (Fur pumpkin use the 2″ extension and for ornament use an 8+ extension above the Union. This is only if you intend to use for both seasons
- Cut PEX to about 8′ (you can try longer this is what I did).
- one piece at a time push the PEX into an open hole on the top hub (do not insert bottom)
- Carefully feed strips into the PEX as you assemble 1 tube at a time. Make sure you do opposite sides as the 5 meter strip will cover 2 sides. Lights should face out with all connectors at the bottom. Once you have both sides of the strip done you can bend the PEX and insert into the bottom. Note you will need to cut off the nut on the female connector (assuming xConnect) to get through the hole in the hub at the bottom.
- Continue to repeat this process until you have all 12 tubes with strips installed.
- In order to secure I used a 5′ piece of rebar pounded about 1′ into the ground
- With 2 people carefully lift prop up and slide over the rebar so it goes through the pipe.
In order to make a topper – I used the Boscoyo Modular Matrix Panels. The ornament topper is easy to cut for a 100 pixel topper. For the pumpkin step it took some work and heat gun to make something workable and shape it.
Model the prop as a Sphere in xLights – Mapping arches to it works well, but if you use Showstopper Sequences they have a Tree Sphere in most of their sequences that works amazing.
For the Ornament Topper I have found pixel forest programming looks good, and the pumpkin topper is sort of a crap shoot.