Hi all. I'm a bit out of touch with the latest LEDs and want

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Hi all. I’m a bit out of touch with the latest LEDs and want to start work on my Xmas lights.

Can any of you recommend an LED string set that ticks the following boxes?

  • 5v (I’m using Proton Core and don’t have time to do 3-12v conversion) I know 5v works from my RGB strip

  • Both Data and Clock line (My shows need the speed!)

  • Must be string and not strip

  • All green wiring (none of this unChristmassy red, white, black and blue nonsense!)

  • 100 lights, or 2 x 50 easily connected in series into one long string

  • supported by FastLED, obviously!

  • (nice to have, but not essential) can be fitted with nicely shaped diffusers.

I hope there are some tested recommendations out there.

Thanks! And, er… Merry Christmas!

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I have been looking for APA102 or SK9822 in 8mm LED strings, but this is the closest I’ve found (5050 square LEDs mounted on small round PCBs, wired in a string): https://www.aliexpress.com/store/product/100x-APA102-pre-soldered-on-heatsink-with-12cm-wire-DC5V-input-APA102-buit-in-5050-rgb/713947_32383031287.html I’m sure you could find or special order them with whatever wire color you’d like.

I’m currently wiring up 250 WS2811 (non-waterproof) and an ESP8266 (Wemos D1 mini pro) to a 6.5 ft white xmas tree. I should have video, pics, and more details to share soon.

WS2811 come in strings with 8mm RGB LEDs. I ordered mine with white wires since I’m using a white tree, but I’m sure you can find them with green wires on AliExpress.

They’re three wire LEDs, but I haven’t noticed any flicker. It takes 30µs per LED to update, so 100 of them would only take 3ms, leaving a max of 333 fps. That’s without using parallel output, which would theoretically double that framerate, right?
https://www.aliexpress.com/store/product/100x-APA102-pre-soldered-on-heatsink-with-12cm-wire-DC5V-input-APA102-buit-in-5050-rgb/713947_32383031287.html

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Oh, and there’s always the old WS2801 strings, which are four wire, cheap, and I think run at 1 or 2MHz: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/50x-12mm-DC5V-WS2801-Pixel-Node-Module-String-Non-waterproof-Addressable-Color/1547453835.html
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/50x-12mm-DC5V-WS2801-Pixel-Node-Module-String-Non-waterproof-Addressable-Color/1547453835.html

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Thanks Jason - these are my Xmas 2014 strings. :slight_smile: It’s weird that not much progress has been made in the last few years. Just the same stuff. I really thought there would be 12 bits per channel, fast, Christmas colored by now…

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@Jason_Coon How are you doing parallel? I’ve created a 16x16 matrix and worried about speed so I have them in groups of 4 (64 ea), one pin per group. I mainly referred to this page, but it wasn’t super illuminating with respect to speed impacts:

Like if I just have them on separate pins, are my calls FastLED.show() happening in parallel since the pins are separate? Your comment about parallel led me to want to inquire!

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@John_Hendy I actually haven’t ever used parallel output, but the details are here (for WS281X): https://github.com/FastLED/FastLED/wiki/Parallel-Output and here (for APA102): https://github.com/FastLED/FastLED/wiki/SPI-Hardware-or-Bit-banging#getting-four-hardware-spi-lines-for-the-apa102-out-of-the-teensy-3031

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@Jason_Coon ​​ oh, that parallel output. Cool. I’m using an Uno and only have a loaner teensy 2.x (don’t recall which) so looks like this won’t work for me.

That said, I do have some esp8266 centered boards (Digistump oak), but have never gotten them to work with fastled…