Good afternoon,
I’m starting a project, where I need to control 8 led strips (straight line) of 25 meters each.
Can someone help me? Thank you
Please provide more details. All the details to can think of.
How many pixels per meter?
What type of pixels?
Is the project just the LEDs or does it involve anything else, like a motion sensor for example?
What sort of display is this going to be?
Does it need to have a minimum frame rate?
What level of experience do you have?
How bright will you need to run the display (ie day time or night time operation) because that will greatly determine how much power you will need. For 25 meters x8, power distribution is probably going to be your biggest challenge.
@marmil
Good evening,
I will have 8 strips of led strip (addressable) 25 meters each!
I need to control them individually and I’m going to use Arduino.
Doubt:
Which model of led tape to use?
How do I fix the strips?
Which Arduino library to use?
Can I control a quantity of 1000 leds strip?
Any similar designs?
The most popular types of addressable LEDs are WS2812B (SK6812 is a common variant that is cheaper and better, but they’re basically the same. Also called Neopixels by Adafruit) and APA102 (same as above, SK9822 is similar. Also called Dotstars by Adafruit). LED strips often come in varieties of 30, 60, and 144 LEDs per meter.
WS2812Bs are relatively cheap (like, just quickly checking Aliexpress, all the strips with 60 LEDs per meter would be ~USD $1000), but they have a slow refresh rate (so if you’re doing anything with persistance of vision, these won’t work) and they have weird timing requirements that will make slow (i.e. 8-bit controllers like the Arduino Uno and Mega) controllers not be able to do anything else when sending data.
APA102s are much more expensive (~USD $2000), but they have a higher refresh rate, and they can be sent data much more quickly with an easier protocol (it’s just SPI). However, if you’re fine with using a more powerful board, there is no need to pay double the price for this.
FastLED is the library that this community is for. It is, by far, the most powerful library for controlling LED strips. It has many built-in features for effects, and extremely fast math.
All of the above calculations assume 60 LEDs per meter, as it is a good compromise between the other popular options.
You’ll need a powerful controller to drive these. At 60 LEDs per meter, that is 12000 pixels. That means that you need 36kB of RAM (3 bytes per LED, because of colors) to drive it at minimum. For reference, an Arduino Mega has 8kB. A popular controller on this forum recently is the ESP32 with ~ 500kB of RAM - it can be programmed with Arduino, just like you’re used to. Its main feature, however, is WiFi. So this would allow you to stream data over the network and display it on the strip. You could, of course, just stream data over USB if that’s what you wanted to do, or just generate patterns without external input. It also (I think) allows you to use what’s called DMA, and (again, I think) up to 8 channels. This would allow you to tell FastLED to output to the display, . Boards for the ESP32 are around USD $10, and they come with a MicroUSB port for easy development.
Next up is power - WS2812Bs use around 60mA per LED at full white. That means that you’ll need 720A at 5V to light all of them up. This equates to 3.6kW. If you’re on 120V power, this means that this requires 30A at mains voltage - requiring two 15A circuits. However, you also have to deal with the issue that the LED strips can’t transfer the full current required to power the full strip. This means that you’ll need to include thick (I haven’t done large installations, so I’m not sure what the guidelines are for this) wires that provide power partway through. I would recommend checking out some manufacturers of power supplies that can provide enough power - you’re looking at 90A @ 5V per strip. Of course, you may be able to be a bit cheap on power supplies if you will never need to light all of them up at full brightness. But you’re still dealing with lots of power, so don’t be too cheap on PSUs. Computer PSUs might work, but be aware that they’re optimized for 12V and that’s what most of the price you’re paying is for.
@Ben_Schattinger
Thank you so much!
You helped me a lot. I’ll do more research on that.
Thank you again!
By chance, is this for use with swimming?
@Budd_Termin yes!!
@Adolfo_Franco in that case, almost all LED strips can be bought in completely waterproof versions. Many sellers offer water-resistant and waterproof (including partially submergable) strips.
@Ben_Schattinger
Yes. But I’ll develop something to protect the strips under the water.
Another question, what is the correct way to install a long strip of led tape without losing light ??
I saw in some people saying for every ~ 10meters to do the energy injection. Is this really true?
Any tips, website, or link for similar projects?
thank you
Yes, that’s true, but 10 meters is probably too far. You’ll need to inject power more often then that depending on how many pixels per meter you get and how bright you want to run them.
12v strips might be something to look into to reduce the number of injection points needed. This video might give you an idea of why you need to inject power so often.
Get some strips and start experimenting.
@marmil
Thank you so much.
You helped me a lot!!!
I’ll do the experiments and in the future comment the result!
Thank you
@Adolfo_Franco I personnally use an esp32 to drive 6000 ws2812b leds and it works like a charmed. Just for you to know even using 8 parallel outputs to refresh 1000 leds you will have 33fps.
@Yves_BAZIN
Very good!
Thanks for the information.