For the 2022 season, we created some “Mega Mini” lights to hang on the front of our house. These lights are designed to look like your standard mini Christmas light bulbs, with one exception… they are MUCH larger! We have twelve of these Mega Mini light strings, split in two halves across the front of out home.
These lights were 3D printed, and the original design credit goes to William Napier, who graciously put his source files up on the 3D printing site cults3d.com. Each of the lights is printed in three different pieces: The base bottom, which is sort of a cup-like structure, the base top, and the bulb tip.
The original print files were a bit too large for our 3D printer to handle, so we scaled them down slightly. They’re still pretty big though. The two pics below show our first prototype, in black & white, as well as the bulb tip by itself. The final lights were printed with green bases, just like most Christmas lights have/
.And here’s a photo of one of the bulb tips just about completed printing:
Once all the bulbs were printed (in their final green color) it was time to work on lighting and wiring them up. Each of these bulbs contains five “bullet pixel” lights, which are the same lights used on our Mega-Tree. The bases have holes which the pixels pop into. The pixels can be virtually any color, which makes our Mega Mini lights able to be any color as well.
The camera tends to wash the color out on these lights, but they have a nice color in person. Here’s a couple of photos from the 2022 display: