Hello all, I have a newbie general question about ws2812b,

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Hello all,

I have a newbie general question about ws2812b, I would appreciate any tips/pointers…

I’ve got this 1meter ws2812b strip, which I have succesfully programmed with an arduino, now I would like to apply the programming to ten 5meter strips.

What do I need to do differently, what do I need to get additionally?

A bigger power supply… A capacitor in front of each strip…?..Do all 10 strips go on the same output PIN…?
…anything else, any other potential issues to pay attention to?

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You’re going to need a suitable power supply first, and then possibly a faster controller, depending on what animations you’re planning and how fast you want them to run…

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I am running 10 “strips” of 72 LEDs each as part of an LED suit. It’s actually 10 grids, but the wiring is the same. At the moment, I have all the strips doing the same thing, so they’re all connected to the one signal line. Performance with a Mega 2560 is fine. For Halloween, I used a Lipo 5000mAh 3S battery which powered things well, as long as I didn’t try for full white on all 720 LEDs.

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By 720 I’m already thinking about running Vixen(free) on a PC down CAT5 to a Alphapix controller(not free). You at least should think about a Due like 6-8 wide on data.

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Thank you guys for the replies! Well that’s interesting, I didn’t expect the controller to be a bottleneck with this sort of upscaling. So if the controller is fast enough animating a single strip, it doesn’t mean it will handle multiple strips just the same, even though they all animate in the same way, because it still has to send individual data to every single LED.
If anyone has any a rule of thumb guesstimations, what type of controlling would suffice for 10 strips with 300 LEDs each…? Or if it would significantly simplify things, I could go for strips with 150LEDs…?
The animations will be with the speed of a heartbeat, either “fadein-fadeout”, or “colorwipe”.
So, pretty fast I think.

Now that I think about it, if I would opt for the fading effect, I could use a non-individually-addressable-strip, which would mean a lot less data output for the microcontroller?