@chad_steinglass you guessed right. Suggestions
@Marc_MERLIN yeah - I can def do a separate power to the controller and run that off of a tiny USB battery… I was just all proud of myself for rigging it up to draw from the vest so I didn’t need it 
but it’s not a big deal to add it.
And yeah - def gotta beef up the wires. I’d rather keep it simple and have one power cord that’s thicker than run a bunch in parallel, so that will have to wait until I hit the hardware store. Will prob go to 16AWG to be safe
Actually… I might have some serious speaker wire around I could use…
@chad_steinglass no, you don’t need a separate battery. The same battery should work. The voltage dip happens on the wire. If you run separate wires to the UC, it should just work even if the wires to the LEDs heat up and lose voltage in the process.
@Marc_MERLIN ah. Of course. Though trying to do my best to keep a tangle of wires to a minimum…
Also - on second thoughts about the one cable: I’m feeding into my power bus dead in the middle of the jacket, so that at the very most the bus wires are carrying half the load of the jacket through the parts right where my power cable attaches…
But if I split it in two and connect in about 1/3 of the way from each end (1/4 would be better but inconvenient) then the largest load any part of the wires in the bus would be carrying would be a bit less…
Though I don’t think that’s my bottleneck at the moment. Will keep testing
@chad_steinglass on so many LEDs, you are limited by the wires, yes, but you are also limited by the copper lines between your LEDs. Long story short you can have huge wires go into your LED strip, and things will still dip unless you re-inject power every 128 LEDs or so. My 256 LED panels have power injection points in 3 places.
@Marc_MERLIN yeah - I inject power in to every single strip. Kinda my little trick for soldering them - and it actually makes it waaay easier - I run a bus perpendicular to the strips and expose a little section of the wire and solder it to each pad, one wire each for +5 and G. Makes it so I only need to hook up data from strip to strip a really speeds up soldering.
@chad_steinglass broken photos link
@Marc_MERLIN oops
missing/deleted image from Google+
Got it. So, in an ideal world, you’d have soldered those 5V/Gnd wires in the exact middle of the strips, not the near end, but it’s done now 
Given your power bus, you can probably get away with 5 to 10 injection points.
After you try an all white test (I don’t recommend full power or it will be a totally unreasonable amount of amps and will melt wires or solder points if you try to push 20A or more on a single small wire), if one end of all your strips is brighter than the other ends, you’ll know why
Also, I have bad news for you. From wearing WS2812B LED strips, I had too many instances where the joint between LEDs broke due to repeated flexing. Bring a soldering iron and spare wire to repair connections between pixels (and you will likely have to solder directly on the LED solder points if the trace broke underneath, which is what happened to me repeatedly).
My shirtv2 uses WS2813 instead which will help due to the backup data path and the lack of holes on the middle of the data pin like you have in your strips (and I had in mine).
I definitely recommend you switch to parallel output, 8 or 16 ways if you can so that you only lose a small portion of your LEDs if a data line breaks, instead of potentially most of them depending on where the breakage happens.
Also, be ready for people to be rough with the shirt when touching and hugging you too hard, and/or your wires or strips getting caught in something and getting ripped out.
If you glued them, bring extra safety pins and/or strong double sticky tape to repair things when the playa dust gets in and ruins your gluing points
@Marc_MERLIN such an idealist! But yeah - sometimes gotta make a compromise for form over function thankfully there’s at most 42 pixels between each connection, so not too worried about that part (my max Y height is 44 and the bus is a few pixels up from the bottom in the back)
And yeah - I’m used to repairing my stuff pretty frequently. And also I’ve learned not to get too bummed out if I lose a strip or a section halfway through the night. Happens a lot if it gets really hot and humid from dancing and sweating. But no big deal. And I’ll def have a solder kit with me in camp.
And I also try to be pretty cognizant of bending and flexing - I definitely learned that hips, knees, and elbows are places NOT to run led strips
@chad_steinglass great, so now you’ll just have to make sure drunk or stoned people don’t grab you too violently, even if they happen to be female and pretty (believe it or not, some stupid woman actually bunched me in the gut, thankfully not too hard, in the middle of my LED panel. By some miracle, it survived, but she disappeared before I could even say “WTF lady???”). My previous shirt with less solid LEDs kept failing in different ways as people put their hands on me in various fashion (like moths to a flame…)
@Marc_MERLIN this is 8 way output right now - needed it to keep my frame rate up! And yes - it does help by making it so if a strip goes down I only lose at most 1/8 of the vest. And I hear ya if it’s cold at night I’ll likely be wearing a white faux fur over this which might protect it. And hopefully I won’t get punched!