The Nearly Famous RGB Video Series - Everything You Wanted To Know About Pixels But Couldn't Find The Answer

When I started researching RGB and pixel solutions in early 2010, there was just about no information on the internet as to what all the teminolgy, protocols, wiring, controllers and other items were.  After extensive research and work with others, I decided to document all the information I knew at the time in the form of a video series.  The focus behind the videos was to simply show each type of lighting, controller, wiring, etc in a non-vendor specific manner so that someone just getting started out could get up to speed on the terminolgy and functions.  This information, while produced in late 2010, early 2011 is older now, every bit of it is still completely relevant.  Since this information is squirrled away on our website, I though I would repost it here for those new to RGB and pixels.

The videos below cover the general topics of RGB as they relate to Holiday Lighting.

Video #1 What is RGB? What are the different type of RGB lighting devices? What is Basic RGB and RGB Pixels? How to Pixels get their addresses? How do you assign channels to pixels? What are controller macros?
Video #2 How do I fix dead pixels? What is the difference between three and four wire pixels?  Does it matter? How do I know which end of my pixels to hook to the controller?  Does it matter? How do I power my pixels? Why are there different voltages for pixels? What is the difference between centralized and de-centralized power distribution of pixels? How many pixels can be on a single controller output? What is color depth in pixels?  Why does it matter?
Video #3 What are the different type of pixel chips? What quality issues should I be aware of when purchasing pixels? What are the drawbacks of RGB over just regular Christmas lights? What advantage do Basic RGB and RGB Pixels give me?
Video #4 What are the different types of Basic RGB controllers? Why would I want to use basic RGB controllers and LEDs instead of pixel based controllers and LEDs? What are the different types of RGB Pixel controllers?

Outlining Your House in RGB Lights - Detailed Design Guide (Updated for 2026)

Updated September 2026. We rewrote this guide around the pixels, mounting and controllers we recommend today. The original 2013 version was built around pixel strip and hardware that has since been replaced.

When you're planning a Christmas display, it's easy to focus on everything going in the yard. But the biggest prop is already there: your house. Outline it, and the house becomes part of the sequence, framing everything you've built in front of it.

Vineyards Lights, Meridian, ID. The rooflines, peaks and garage all become part of the show.

If you want the big picture first (why a mounting system matters and how to pick between seasonal and permanent), start with our house outline primer. This post is the step-by-step design: how to measure, how many pixels you need, how to power them and where the controller goes.

Would you rather have us do the math? Fill out our project design form and we'll send you instructions for sending us one photo of your house and your measurements. We'll put together a recommendation and a complete quote with the controller, mounting, hardware and accessories for your project.

Step 1: Start with a photo

Go outside and take a photo of your house from where your audience will see it, usually the street. You'll sketch your design on this photo and use it to record measurements, where cables will run and where the controller and power supplies will go.

We'll use Nathanial R.'s house as our example throughout. It has 19 separate rooflines, so it's a good example of how a house with complex roof lines can be handled.

Step 2: Measure every run

Get out the ladder and tape measure and record the exact length of every section you want to outline. Write each one on the photo.

Accuracy matters. Every foot you miss is another 4 pixels at 3 inch spacing, which changes your pixel count, your power budget and possibly how many controller outputs you need.

Step 3: Choose seasonal or permanent mounting

Across a whole house, mounting pixels one at a time means a lot of clips, a lot of alignment and a lot of visible black wire. A mounting system lets you build the outline in sections that hold their spacing and aim, snap into a few clips and come down as a unit for repairs.

Want it to come down after Christmas? Use Pixel Pipe. Each aluminum pipe is 7.3 feet long with 88 holes on 1 inch centers, sized for standard 12mm bullet pixel nodes. It's available in black, white or mill-finish grey, mounts with clear, UV-resistant clips that can stay on the house year-round, and rotates in its clips so you can aim the pixels toward your viewing area. Couplers, corners and tees let you follow the roofline.

Want it to stay up? Use PixaTrack. Each track is 6.66 feet long with 80 holes on 1 inch centers and takes 12mm bullet or square-neck nodes. It fully encloses the wiring to protect it from UV and animals, comes in off-white or brown to blend with the house, and is available with front-facing or side/down-facing holes.

Both come as samples, so you can hold one up against your house before you decide.

Step 4: Pick your spacing and count your pixels

Because both systems are drilled on 1 inch centers, you can space pixels at 1, 2, 3 inches or more by skipping holes. Two things set how far apart you can go:

• The wire length between nodes on the pixel string. Our 100-count 12mm node strings reach up to about 3.4 inches between nodes. For wider spacing, our 6 inch strings reach up to about 6.8 inches.
• The look you want. Closer spacing reads as a solid line and gives you more resolution for effects. Wider spacing costs less and gives a more classic bulb-by-bulb look.

The math is simple:

Pixels = run length in inches ÷ spacing in inches
DMX channels = pixels × 3

For Nathanial's house we grouped the 19 measured sections into four continuous runs and used 3 inch spacing:

Run	Length	Pixels (3" spacing)	DMX channels	Watts at full white
Garage front	26 ft	104	312	57
Garage, over the doors	34 ft	136	408	75
Front of house, upper	53 ft	212	636	117
Front of house, lower	31 ft	124	372	68
Total	144 ft	576	1,728	317

At 170 pixels per DMX universe, 576 pixels needs 4 universes. Any current E1.31 pixel controller handles that over a single network cable.

Step 5: Plan your power

Our 12v, 12mm nodes draw about 0.55 watts each at full white (45 milliamps). That's where the watts column above comes from: 576 pixels × 0.55 W = about 317 watts, or roughly 26 amps at 12 volts. Size your power supplies with headroom above that number, since draw varies with temperature, wiring and supply voltage.

The second question is how far the power can travel. As power runs down a string, voltage drops through the LEDs and the wire itself. Our 100-count node strings are designed to run the full 100 nodes with power fed at the start. Past that, plan to inject power. Three of the four runs above are over 100 pixels, so each would get power injection partway along, or be split into two shorter runs fed from separate outputs.

To inject, run heavier-gauge wire (14 AWG is a good start) from the power supply to the injection point and connect it to the power and ground of the string there. The data passes straight through, since each pixel regenerates it. See our guide to wire selection for sizing the injection wire.

Test before it goes on the house. Build a section, set it to full white for 15 to 30 minutes and measure the voltage at the controller output and at the last pixel with a multimeter. A drop of 10 to 20% is usually fine. Much more than that and you'll see dimming or color shift at the end of the run, or random flicker if the voltage falls below what the pixel chips need. Finding that on the ground is a lot easier than finding it on the roof.

Step 6: Place the controller

Look at your photo for where runs start and end. Places where two runs meet, like a garage corner or the peak over a front door, are natural spots to feed two outputs from one location. Current pixel controllers and sequencing software let you reverse a run's direction, so a run can start at either end.

The data signal from a pixel controller output only travels a limited distance to the first pixel, so you have two basic layouts:

• One central controller. An AlphaPix Classic with 4 or 16 outputs, placed somewhere central and close to the runs. It keeps everything in one enclosure, and spare outputs can drive other props in the yard.
• A controller plus long-range receivers. With a Flex system, the controller can sit in the garage and small long-range receivers go near the roofline where the runs start. This is the better fit for large houses, runs that start far apart, or when you want the main controller out of sight.

For Nathanial's four runs and about 317 watts, a single 4-output controller placed near the garage corner would handle the whole outline. Adding props later, or splitting the long runs, is where a 16-output controller or a Flex system with receivers starts to make sense. Our Controller Selection Wizard walks you through the options.

Step 7: Build and test on the ground

One of the biggest advantages of Pixel Pipe and PixaTrack is that you can build each section on the ground, plug it in and test it before it goes up. With connectors between sections, a problem later means unplugging one section, fixing it in the garage and putting it back without disturbing your spacing. With a seasonal install, the sections come down as a unit and go back up next year exactly as they were.

Watch the full process

Our house outline video walks through planning and building an outline with Pixel Pipe and PixaTrack from start to finish:

Let us put it together for you

You don't have to work out every part of the system yourself. Fill out our project design form and we'll send you instructions for sending one photo of your house and your measurements. We'll look at what you're planning and put together a recommendation and a complete quote with the controller, mounting, hardware and accessories you'll need.

Want to see the mounting in person first? Pixel Pipe and PixaTrack samples let you compare colors against your house before choosing a system.

HolidayCoro.com

A Technical Guide to (RGB) Wire Selection

With the advent of RGB lighting, there is a need to now carry power over wires that are different than those the community has used in the past for AC based power - namely SPT1 and SPT2 cords.  There are a variety of factors to consider when determining the type of wire you want to use for wiring RGB lighting - whether it is for smart/pixels or basic/dumb lighting:

• What is the amount of current required for the lights?
• What are the conditions the wire will be used in or with? (water, UV exposure, temperature range, how much flex will it be exposed to)
• Cost - not only for the wire itself but also the connectors used with it.
• Availability
• Easy of use (soldering, crimping, etc)

Current Carrying Capacity
First, lets start off with the most important function of any wire - it's ability to carry power.  The primary method of expressing power carrying ability of a wire is in amps.  But...you need to look at the voltage also.  For example, a wire rated to carry 1 amp of power (it doesn't matter is the power is DC or AC):

• 1 amp at 5 volts is 5 watts (Current  or amps * Voltage = Watts)
• 1 amp at 12 volts is 12 watts
• 1 amp at 120 volts 120 watts

So, as you can see, the actual power (watts) a wire can carry varies based on it's voltage (this is part of the reason some people choose 12v RGB lights over 5v pixel lights).  This is the same reason that a high tension power wire for interstate power transfer is in the millions of volts - if the same, 1" diameter cable was at 120 volts as opposed to millions, it would have to be massively larger (in diameter) to carry the same amount of power.  So - volts matter.

So, how to do you know how much current (or amps) a wire can handle?  Well, it's complicated and at the end of this article we will show you the "real world" method to determine what wire you need to use.  There are a number of factors that go into the calculation - including material type (tin, aluminum, copper), design (stranded vs solid wire), the diameter of the wire (gauge or in the US, AWG), the temperature the wire is exposed to, how many wires are bundled together and the insulating material.  You can start with charts, such as this one that give you a rough idea of how much a SINGLE wire can carry - remember that there are always two wires required for AC and DC wiring systems.  When you look at a chart you want to find the AWG (American Wire Gauge) or gauge.  How do you know what gauge the cable is?  Well, it's complicated also for the following reasons:

• Some vendors lie about the gauge of cable - this is very common for wiring sourced from China.  This is most common with wiring used in RGB lights. 
• The charts most often assume you are using solid copper - the best possible (short of gold and silver) conductor of power but often due to cost reasons, you may have tin wire plated in copper or aluminum wire plated in copper or some other variation, which renders the tables invalid.

So, we would always recommend looking closely at the cable and then measuring the cable diameter with a micrometer if you have them.  If you are using CAT5 cable or other cable purchased in the US on a roll, it's usually safe to trust the AWG listing.  So, now you have your wire gauge, say, 18 gauge or AWG.  So, we look up on the table for 18 AWG and find that it can handle 16 amps per wire for "chassis wiring" or 2.3 amps for "power transmission".  Those are some pretty big differences - why is that?  Again, the difference is due to the use of the cable, insulation and other factors. 
Conditions The Wire is Used In
There is no one perfect wire because the conditions that each project it is used in vary.  For example, one person may be permanently installing lighting onto their house and does not have intentions to remove it.  In that case, issues of UV exposure (which breaks down the insulation on the cable) and temperature exposure become important factors.  In this case you might also consider using a solid wire as opposed to a stranded wire as there will not be much future movement (and thus breakage) of the wire.  For installations in very cold regions, the insulation material is an important consideration as common insulation's are made from vinyl which doesn't function well in low temperatures.

So, when selecting cable, consider how the cable will be used and select a cable that meets those specific environmental issues.

Cable Cost
Of course a big factor in cable selection is cost.  The major cost in any cable is the wire, which is most often copper.  You don't want to select a cable that has conductors that are too thin and thus unable to carry sufficient current but you don't want to have overkill as this results in higher costs, heavier cable and often less flexibility.  Also keep in mind that cable cost is also a function of the quality of the insulation, so if you cheap out on a cable that doesn't have UV resistance and the cable has to be replaced after two seasons (along with all the associated soldering and connections), you may not have saved that much in the long term.

Availability
There is always a "right" cable for every need out there in the market, though often those "special" cables are so expensive that the "right" cable can't be used.  So after determining what gauge and insulation that is required, see what vendors carry that cable.  Often moving to a more "standard" cable, such as in the case of CAT5, results in many more vendors, greater competition and as a result, lower costs and higher availability.  So, don't rule out a cable that is close to the specs you need.

Ease of Use
This is one of the least considered factors in cable selection.  Easy of use includes a variety of issues, such as:

• Can the cable be purchased with pre-attached and tested connectors?  This is common with CAT5 and SPT cables which are standardized in wiring, color and design. 
• How easy is it to attach connectors?  Some wire can be very hard to work with due to the small gauge, multiple layers of insulation, strain reliefs or other factors.  Having to attach connectors to each cable, correctly (to prevent possible mis-wiring related damage) can often take a considerable period of time depending on the number of cables you need.
• What types of connectors can be used and do they meet your needs?  CAT5, for example, is ubiquitous and has many types of splitters / combiners, connectors (female / male, etc), waterproof and non-waterproof and more.  If your design calls for direct attached cable, such as screw terminals, is the wire strong enough to handle multiple screw downs on it?
• Connector costs is one of the biggest factors.  Usually in most systems you will have a connector based system for hooking up elements as they are, in the Holiday Lighting world, temporary in nature.  So, while a spool of cable might be cheap up front, if it requires expensive connectors, the overall cost of that connection method goes up and the connectors could be more expensive than the cable itself.  Be sure to think end-to-end on what you need from your connector - does it need to be waterproof or just water resistant?  Does it matter if the connection is water resistant at all (such as the case with SPT cord.)  Don't spend money on waterproofing connections that don't benefit from it.

The Real World Example
So, I've discussed a variety of the issues you should consider on how to select a wire or more specifically, a wiring "system" - how does this work in the real world?

Let's say that you want to hookup four flood lights to a single controller.  We will be using 100ft of cable between the power supply and each flood, resulting in a total of 500ft of cable between the start (power supply/controller) and the last flood.  What cable do you need and what factors would you consider?  They are:

• What is the power consumption of the flood?  Well, maybe the vendor says this is a "10 Watt" flood.  What does that mean?  Does the flood REALLY use a total of 10 Watts?  Well, don't trust your vendor - get our your multi-meter / VOM and actually measure the current draw of the single flood.  We have an article on our Knowledge Base that describes this process and here is a video that you can follow to learn how to do it:
  
  After you have the actual power consumption of a single flood, you can then determine the overall power draw.  So, lets say that the flood actually did consume 10 watts of power or .833 amps at 12 volts or a total of 2.5 amps at 12v DC for all four floods.
• Knowing the current consumption of the flood lights is just part of the equation - now you need to determine the power consumption of the cable itself.  Wait...what?  Yes, the wire itself uses the same power that is used to power your lights.  Think about a water hose - if you hook a few 100ft sections of water hose together, you'll end up with a pretty low water "pressure" (aka voltage) at the end of the hoses, compared to the pressure coming directly out of the faucet.  The same applies to your power supply - if you have a power supply that provides exactly 2.5 amps of power at 12v DC, you will need even more power just to replace the losses from the cable itself. 
• So, what do you do?  You have two options, you can choose to waste the power by using a thinner wire (wire diameter/thickness goes down as the gauge goes up) and just purchase a larger power supply to "over come" the losses in the cable (up to a point) OR you could purchase a lower gauge wire (thicker) that more efficiently carries the power and results in few losses.  This is why when you look at the wire gauge table, you will notice that there is a rating that references "ohms per ...".  Ohms is a measurement of the resistance that the cable puts up against the power flowing through it.  Of course as you can imagine, a smaller diameter cable will have a higher ohms per foot rating than a thicker, larger diameter cable. 
• So, what do you do with this ohms per whatever rating?  Let's take an 18 AWG wire - it has about 6.3 ohms of resistance per 1000 feet or 3.15 ohms per 500 feet - the amount of cable we will be using in this example.  So, we will put these values through an ohms law calculator and we come up with a number of .48 watts.  That means for each wire (we need two) we will loose .48 watts or about 1 watt total for the entire length of the cable pair.  As such, we would then need to add the 1 watt of power consumption from the cable to the total power consumption of the floods (40 watts) for a total of 41 watts. 
• So, say you have a larger power supply, maybe 100 watts and you wanted to reduce your wiring costs and use 24 gauge wire - could that work?  Let's see.  24 AWG looses about 25 ohms per 500 feet for a total loss (per pair of wires) of 5.7 watts, plus the 40 watts for the floods, for a total of 45.7 watts - so you are good to go - right?  Nope.  24 AWG can carry about .6 amps per wire, for a total of 1.2 amps of power carrying capacity per pair or about 14.4 watts total.  So, 24 AWG is out because it just isn't large enough. 
• But wait!  What if you were using CAT5 which ccommonly uses, eight, 24 gauge wires.  If you use two wires for the DMX signal, that leaves you with six, 24 AWG wires - is this enough?  The total current carry capacity of the six wires is 3.6 amps or 43 watts.  That's a little tight for four, 10 watt floods, so what losses does the cable have over 500 feet of cable?  Again, it has a loss of 5.7 watts per pair or about 17 watts total.  Add the 17 watts to the 40 watts and you have 57 watts which is "iffy" on a cable designed for about 43 watts at 500 feet. 
• So, what if you use it anyway?  Will something bad happen?  It depends.  The more overloaded the wire is, the higher its resistance will become, so where there is some head room, there isn't a free ride here.  What will occur is that you'll end up wasting power (about 15-20 watts) that you would otherwise have not wasted...but maybe the CAT5 cable was much cheaper than the purchase of the 18 gauge cable and that difference was much greater than the cost of the lost power (and the larger power supply to provide that power).
• Here is a simple test - take a VOM or multi-meter and measure the voltage at the power output from the power supply and then take a second measurement at the end of the cable, with all items turned on with full output (white for RGB lights) and compare the voltages.  Let's say you start off with 12.5v at the power supply, you may end up with 10v at the end.  Is that bad?  Well, it depends on your controller and lights.  You *might* notice a drop in light output on the 4th flood verses the 1st flood or you may not - it all depends.  Some controllers will have no problem running on that 10v, some others may not be able to handle that drop.  This is most common on pixel strings where you can see 50%+ voltage drops.

So, after all that you can see that there is no one single "best" answer as to what wire you should use or how many items you can put on a length of wire - there are a number of factors to consider and what we always recommend doing is using the math and ohms law as a starting point, building your design and then testing voltages and power consumption of the devices to determine if the cable is overloaded or has too large of a power drop.

Feel free to post additional questions on the feedback section.

Thanks,

David

HolidayCoro.com