Ultimate LED Hanukkah Display

While there’s no shortage of holiday decorations this time of year, Ben Forta’s Hanukkah display is one of the most amazing DIY builds I’ve seen. While the animation seen at the beginning of the video below is interesting, to really appreciate the physical scale of this build, check out around 0:45.

You can see it on display there above a garage door, the main part of which measures 6’x12’, not including the 3’x2’ dreidels on each side. Cleverly, Forta used aluminum frames and chicken wire to support the lights, allowing it to stand up to 60 MHP winds.

From a technical standpoint though, what’s most impressive is the scale of the control system. In order to display the menorah and dreidel, it uses 3,500 individual Adafruit NeoPixels on over 100 individual strips. Processing power is provided via a Teensy, with an OctoWS2811 adapter board in order to control the huge number of menorah LEDs. A pair of Trinket Pro boards control each of the dreidels.

The main menorah display requires around 800 lines of code to animate the lighting ceremony, and the dreidels “only” require 250. This allows it to display the correct lighting sequence for each day in Hanukkah, or to loop through all the days at other times of the year.