I like Ray Wu’s store and Shenzhen Rita Lighting. Both stores seem to sell the same products. I think it is because Ray is selling RITA products. The prices are very close sometimes the shipping is different. http://www.aliexpress.com/store/312912
Thanks again for the help. I’m designing uplighting for my wedding, and starting a lighting rental business afterwards. Stretching my dollars in the beginning is important.
I use http://gree-leds.com most of the time, but have also ordered from Ray Wu. He has wider selection, but slightly higher prices and slower shipping.
Is there a reason you really need the 144/M? That’s a lot of light (and power). Sometimes less is more. I’ve used the 60/M strips a lot and they are awesome. I’ve gotten them for $11-$12/M (group buy, so YMMV)
A full reel is actually 5m. And because I get them in bulk (as in multiple reels at a time), I go to http://alibaba.com instead. aliexpress is the consumer portion whereas alibaba is for bulk purchases (though the line between the two has become fuzzy over time.)
I decided to develop my own when the fiance and I were inquiring about the cost to rent such lighting. It’ll be cheaper to build, and then with renting the equipment we make a return on our investment.
Most of the lighting units they use for such applications are LED Par lights (expensive and archaic) . I can do better with some WS2812Bs and a trinket.
You almost certainly don’t need 144/meter. Those are handy if you are doing image displays, but take a lot of power (2x 60/m) and will almost certainly be too bright (or you’ll have them dialed down all the time.
Also, I’d recommend going with a teensy (3.0 if you want even more memory) A trinket will be limited in how many pixels it can drive. Remember you need 3 bytes of RAM for each pixel, plus whatever else the library and your code takes. As the strip has it’s own memory, it would be possible to write a library that uses less (write-only type thing) with limited colors, but that’s a pretty advanced job.
Each unit i’m building will a partial strip in it. Max each unit will only have 80 pixels, so power per unit won’t be an issue. I could get away with a 2a adapter per unit since they’ll only be shining color, not white. I’ll probably get 4a adapters just to be safe.
The pixel density of the 144 strip is favorable for creating a smaller enclosure for the unit.
As for Teensy vs Trinket, the only thing the microcontroller has to do is set the color upon powering on. No fancy animation (as of yet), no reacting to audio (fft), no other sensory input, so I think the Trinket will do fine. And it’s less than half the cost, which when building 12 or so units makes a big difference.
80 should work on the attiny85’s (and trinkets). If you’re making more than a couple of them I would just use the base attiny85’s. For $2 you could have a controller. You don’t need the rest of the stuff on the trinket for some simple lights (since you aren’t using any terribly voltage sensitive components).
