Custom Patterns Guide

What’s inside

Read it front to back once, then keep it near the door. Chapter 4 is the one you will come back to — everything before it makes that chapter faster, and everything after it makes the results better.

How your system thinks

Four words carry the whole system. Learn them now and every screen in the app becomes obvious.
Your roofline is not a light. It is a line of individually addressable pixels that happens to be shaped like your house. Once you see it that way, designing a pattern stops being guesswork and becomes something closer to laying tile: a small unit, repeated, along a known length.

Setup and first connection

Ten minutes, once. Do it properly and you will not think about it again.

Screenshot walkthrough: How to Connect Your Device. Tabs after that: How to Operate the App.

Before you start

• A 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi network. The controller connects on 2.4 GHz only — it cannot see a 5 GHz network. Most home routers broadcast both.
• Your phone on that same 2.4 GHz network for the duration of pairing. You can switch it back afterwards.
• Your Wi-Fi password, typed rather than autofilled — autofill is a common cause of a silent failure
• Power to the controller. If your system has a switched outlet or breaker, confirm it is on.

1. Install the app and create your account The MAGnificent Lighting app is free on the App Store and Google Play, with no subscription and no paid tier. Create an account on first launch — the account is what lets you recall your saved scenes on a new phone and share the system with the rest of the household.
2. Add your system as a device Choose to add a device and select the Wi-Fi pairing method. Bluetooth pairing exists as a fallback and works within roughly 10 m of the controller, but Wi-Fi is what gives you control from anywhere and scheduling that runs whether or not your phone is home
3. Enter the 2.4 GHz name and password Enter your 2.4 GHz network name and password. Pairing typically completes in about two minutes. Stay near the controller while it runs.
4. Name the system Give it a name you will still understand in a year — “Front House” beats “Controller 1”. If you have more than one controller, name them by what they light, and put them in the same folder or group so you can drive them together.
5. Check for a firmware update Do this once now, in device settings, and again if anything ever behaves strangely. Firmware updates are where new effects and stability fixes arrive.
6. Run the confirmation test Apply any ready-made design at full brightness and walk to the street. You are checking three things: every light lights, the colours match end to end, and nothing flickers. Report anything that fails this test to your install team while the system is new.

Who else should have access

Share the system with anyone in the house who will want to change it — partner, kids old enough to be trusted with a colour wheel, a house-sitter. Sharing is per-person from your account, and it can be withdrawn. It is far better than one person holding the only phone that works on Christmas Eve.

The app at a glance

There are two levels. The first screen, Controller, lists the systems on your account under your home — yours will show as online with a master switch beside it. Tapping into a system opens the five tabs where all the real work happens.

Tab	What it is for
Color	Quick colour control across the whole system
Pattern	The design library, and under Custom, every design you build — Chapter 4
Download	Additional designs to bring into your library
Music	Sound-reactive modes
Timer	Timers and Autoplay schedules — Chapter 11

This manual lives almost entirely in Pattern and Timer.

Map your home and build your zones

Twenty minutes with a phone and a pen will save you every hour you would otherwise lose guessing which light is which.

Everything in the app addresses your house by position in the run. Your eye addresses it by geography. The run map is the translation between the two, and it is the difference between “why is the red on the garage?” and a pattern that lands exactly where you drew it.

Step one · confirm the light count

Open the app, tap into your system, and go to Pattern → Custom → +. The grid of numbered circles you see is every light the controller believes it has. Confirm that number matches what is actually on the house. If it is set too low, the lights past the end of the count sit dark and nothing you design will reach them; if it is set too high, your pattern gets stretched across a house longer than yours.

Step two · find light one

Set a single light to a strong colour with everything else black, then walk outside. That corner is the beginning of your run. Write it down. Repeat with the last number in the count to confirm the far end.

Step three · walk the boundaries

Working in blocks of ten, light ranges one at a time and note where each block sits on the house. Photograph each step. In fifteen minutes you will have an exact map of which numbers cover the front elevation, where the garage begins, and which lights turn the corner. Keep the photos — they are the reference you will use every time you design something zone-specific.

Step four · build the zones in the app

1. Open a custom design Pattern → Custom → +. The Create Customization screen is where zones are built as well as coloured.
2. Tap Create Group That opens Create Zone, titled Add Or Delete Zone.
3. Select the lights that make up the area Under “Add Or Delete Zone”, tap each numbered light. This is where your run map earns its keep — you are working in numbers, not in geography.
4. Tap Create The zone joins the list above the light grid, alongside the ones already there.
5. Repeat for each area of the house Front, garage, sides, rear at minimum. Give architectural features their own zone where they deserve one.

Build your first custom pattern

Nine steps in the Create Customization screen. The first time takes fifteen minutes; after that, about ninety seconds.

1. Open the Custom tab From the device screen, tap Pattern in the bottom bar, then the Custom tab at the top. Tap + to start a new design.
2. Choose your canvas Use the selector at the top right of Create Customization to pick a zone, or leave it on all lights. Beginners should start with the whole run; once you are comfortable, zone by zone is where the good work happens.
3. Select the lights you want to colour Tap them individually, or use Select in the toolbar to sweep across a range. Deselect lights clears everything and starts you over — it is the fastest way out of a mess.
4. Pick a colour Tap a swatch under Common colors. The four white presets sit first (PW, CW, WW and a cooler CW), followed by the solid colours, with black for lights you want left off. The control at the right of the palette row opens finer colour choice when a preset is not quite right.
5. Set the brightness The slider at the bottom applies to the current selection. Start around 75–85% rather than 100%: saturated colour at full output blooms against pale soffits and loses its edge.
6. Build the repeat Select the next group of lights and give them the second colour. Work in a repeating unit — four or six lights — rather than colouring the whole house one light at a time. Chapter 5 is devoted to choosing that number.
7. Undo freely Undo and Redo sit at the left of the toolbar. Nothing you do here is permanent until you save, so experiment.
8. Preview on the house Preview pushes the design to the roofline so you can judge it on the building rather than on a phone screen. Walk to the street. Everything looks different from thirty metres.
9. Save and name it Save, then give it a name you will recognise in eleven months: Xmas — Candy Cane — v2 beats Custom 4. It appears in Pattern → Custom with a toggle, and it becomes available to timers.

Working faster in the editor

• Select lets you work across a run of lights instead of tapping them one at a time. Deselect lights clears the whole selection — the fastest way out of a mess.
• Create Group is available while you design. A zone built here becomes available for all future designs and timers.
• Undo and Redo track every change since you opened the editor. Nothing is permanent until Save.
• Preview before you save, every time. Walk to the street. A design that looks right on a phone can look wrong from thirty metres.
• The toggle beside a saved design in Pattern → Custom is what actually lights the house. Saving does not switch it on.

The repeat unit

One number decides whether your pattern looks composed or accidental. Here is how to choose it.

Choose a length that divides evenly

If a zone holds 60 lights, a repeat of 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10 or 12 lands perfectly at the far corner. A repeat of 7 or 8 leaves a partial unit at the end — sometimes invisible, sometimes exactly the thing your eye catches. Check the count of the zone you are designing for, and prefer a divisor.

Translate lights into feet

Ask your installer for your light spacing — 12 in (30 cm) is a common figure, though it varies with the run. Multiply spacing by repeat length and you have the physical size of your pattern: at 12 in spacing, a 6-light unit is a 6 ft motif, tiling roughly seven times across a 40 ft elevation. This is the number that tells you whether a design will read from the street or dissolve into a blur.

Colour that works outdoors

Colour behaves differently at night, at distance, and against brick. These are the rules that survive contact with a real house.

Use a white preset for white

Your lights carry a dedicated white LED alongside red, green and blue, and the palette gives you four white presets built on it — PW, CW, WW and a second, cooler CW. Use those rather than mixing a white out of red, green and blue in the colour picker. A mixed white shifts colour along the run, shows up green or pink in photographs, and looks dirty against pale trim. The dedicated white is cleaner, more consistent light to light, and draws less power for the same brightness.

The presets cover almost every design in this manual. Reach for the picker only when a preset is close but not right — and then set a value, walk to the street, and adjust. Two minutes outside beats twenty on the couch.

Palettes that hold up at distance. Three colours, one of them near-neutral.

Five rules that do the heavy lifting

1. Three colours, maximum. Two saturated colours plus one neutral — white, warm white, or black — covers almost every design worth keeping. A fourth colour rarely adds anything the street can see.
2. Give every saturated colour a frame. Red beside green at full brightness vibrates and reads as visual noise. Put a white or an unlit light between them and both colours get sharper.
3. Black is a colour. Unlit lights create rhythm, save power, and make the lit ones look brighter. Some of the most elegant patterns are half dark.
4. Weight your mix roughly 60/30/10. Sixty per cent of the lights in your dominant colour, thirty in the secondary, ten as the accent. Even splits look undecided.
5. Match the house, not the screen. Warm materials — brick, cedar, sandstone — want warm tones. Cool grey stucco and black trim carry cooler whites and deeper blues without looking cold.

Animation and effects

Motion is the loudest tool you have. Used sparingly it is magic; used constantly it is a car alarm.

A chase is the same pattern, redrawn one position along, many times a second.

The six families

Speed, direction, restraint

Speed is the difference between elegant and frantic. As a rule: if you can watch it for a full minute without your eye being pulled back to it, the speed is right for an everyday scene. Anything faster belongs to an event.

Direction follows the run, and it is reversible. Pair it with zones for effects that mean something — a sweep that starts at the garage and travels across the front to the far corner reads as a deliberate gesture; the same sweep with no zone logic just looks like the lights are busy.

Layered design with zones

The difference between a lit house and a designed one is almost never colour. It is brightness hierarchy.

Set every zone to the same brightness and the house flattens into a single bright outline. Step the brightness down as surfaces move away from the street and the house gains depth — the eye reads the brightest plane as nearest and everything else recedes behind it.

A brightness ladder

A brightness ladder that works on most homes. Adjust the values, keep the order.

Four whole-house recipes

The recipe book

Fourteen designs with exact settings. Values are R/G/B/W, each 0–255. Each design is a repeat unit — you design the sequence once, and the app tiles it.

How to adapt any recipe to your house

• Too busy? Double the repeat length and remove the third colour.
• Too dim from the street? Raise brightness in 10% steps, not to 100% in one jump.
• Colours look muddy? One of them is probably mixed white. Move it to the W channel.
• Lands unevenly at the corner? Change the repeat to a number that divides your zone count — see the table in Chapter 5.

Save, organise and share

A library you can navigate in the dark, on a phone, with guests arriving.

Name scenes so future-you can find them

Recommended shape: Category — Name — Version. Examples: Xmas — Candy Cane — v2, Everyday — Warm Amber — v1, Game — Canucks — v1. Version numbers matter because editing a saved scene replaces the original. Duplicate first, then edit the copy.

Folder structure that survives a year

Scheduling lives in Chapter 11

Once a design is saved and named, a timer can run it on the days and at the times you choose — and that is where most of the value of a saved library comes from. The full walkthrough, screen by screen, is Chapter 11.

The year at a glance

Build these in advance, in daylight, when nothing is urgent. An hour in early autumn covers most of the calendar.

Share, don’t re-create

Designs can be sent to other people running the same system — the pattern travels, so a look you worked out for a wedding can be handed to family without describing it light by light. Household access is separate from design sharing: give the people you live with control of the system itself, so nobody has to text you to turn the lights off.

Timers: put a custom pattern on a schedule

A design you have to remember to turn on is a design you will stop using. Ten minutes here and the house runs itself for the rest of the year.

The Timer tab at the bottom of the app holds two things: Timer, where a saved design runs between a start and an end time on the days you choose, and Autoplay, where several designs rotate in sequence. Everything you built in Chapter 4 becomes available to both.

Schedule a custom pattern — nine steps

1. Open Timer → Timer Tap Timer in the bottom bar, then the Timer tab at the top. (Autoplay is the other tab — more on it below.)
2. Tap the + button The Create Timer screen opens.
3. Name it Tap Timer Name and name it after the scene it runs, not after the time it runs. Names are what you read in the list six months from now.
4. Set Lighting to Pattern Pattern runs one saved look for the whole window. Autoplay runs a rotating sequence. For a custom design you built yourself, choose Pattern.
5. Tap the Pattern row, then choose Custom A Mode dialog offers Lighting Color, Pattern and Custom. Custom is the one that reaches your own saved designs. Lighting Color runs a single solid colour; Pattern runs one of the built-in library designs.
6. Pick your design The Lighting Scene list shows your saved custom folders. Tap the one this timer should run. Its badge then appears on the Pattern row and, later, in the timer list. This is why naming them properly in Chapter 4 matters.
7. Choose the days Repeat offers Week or Year. Week gives you Mon to Sun — tap every day it should run, or all seven for an everyday scene. Year is for a design tied to calendar dates rather than weekdays.
8. Set the start and end times Each has two modes. Time is a fixed clock time. Sunrise Sunset follows the daylight through the year, so the lights arrive later in June and earlier in December without you touching anything. Most homes want sunset to start and a fixed hour to end.
9. Save, then flip the toggle on Save at the top right returns you to the list. A saved timer does nothing until its toggle is on — this is the single most common reason a schedule “did not work”.

Seasonal timers without the annual scramble

Build the holiday designs in daylight in October, give each one its own timer, and leave every one of them saved with the toggle off. When the season arrives you flip a switch instead of designing anything. Turning last year’s Christmas timer back on takes about four seconds; rebuilding it on a cold evening in December takes considerably longer.

Autoplay: several designs in rotation

The Autoplay tab is for sequences of looks rather than single ones. A Holiday row at the top provides ready-made collections: Christmas, Halloween, Thanksgiving, and the device’s own set. A folder button on the right of the Holiday row lets you create your own collections. An autoplay list appears below, with a play button. If no list exists, + starts the creation process.

Use Autoplay for variety without attention — a December sequence of three Christmas designs, or a rotation for a party. For everyday lighting, one saved pattern on a timer is calmer.

To schedule one: build the autoplay sequence first. Then create a timer and set Lighting to Autoplay instead of Pattern. Days and times are the same as above.

Troubleshooting

Symptom, likely cause, fix. Work down the table in order — the cheap checks are first for a reason.

Care and maintenance

The system is built to sit outside through Canadian winters and needs very little from you. What little it needs is worth knowing.

• Leave snow and ice alone. Do not chip ice off lights or fittings. They are sealed and they will come back on their own as the roofline clears.
• Rinse, do not scrub. If lights look dull after a dusty summer, a gentle hose rinse is enough. No solvents, no pressure washer, no ladders on your account.
• Tell your roofer. Before any roofing, gutter, siding or painting work, let us know and let the trades know the system is there. Coordinated work protects your warranty.
• Check the controller once a year. Confirm it is dry, powered and firmware-current. Autumn, before the holiday season, is the natural time.
• Re-check after a router change. A new router or a new network name means the controller needs the new credentials — the same pairing steps in Chapter 2.

Answers, terms and worksheets

The questions we are asked most, the words this manual uses, and a page to plan on.

Frequently asked

Glossary

The one-page version

Everything you need to build a pattern, on a single page. Tear it out if you like.