I've been working on lighting up a spare styrofoam sign we have at work

Matthew_Vandenbossch · November 5, 2016, 12:54am

I’ve been working on lighting up a spare styrofoam sign we have at work with WS2812 strips!
I ordered 35m of 30/m from Aliexpress and I was accidentally shipped 60/m. Now we have 2x the number of LEDs I planned on having at a total of 2,236!
It’s all controlled by a poor ESP8266 and is broken up into 3 strings.
I have created a pretty basic controlled board that mounts the ESP8266, takes power has 3 XLR plugs to be connected to each strip. I’m designing a v2 of this board that will have the level shifter, some data resistors and will fit nicely into the power supply. I used XLR jacks & the ESP8266 to try and make it as user friendly as possible. Once I get a case for the controller, XLR means anyone can unplug each section easily, take it somewhere else and just plug it in. The ESP8266 means I can put it in a softAP mode and the same person can just connect to it’s wifi to control it!
It’s all powered by a TDK LAMBDA 5v 26a power supply that does get warm when all the LEDs are on. I plan to put a fan or two in the case for the controller when I find one that is the right size.
The wiring runs all the way along the base of the letters with power running through some mains wiring the whole way across, and some small PCBs to junction each letter and allow the flow of the data using some solder jumpers. I’ve just finished covering the wiring loom with some conduit.
The strips are connected to the styrofoam with hot glue, and boy was that a tedious task.
The software is just an arduino sketch + fastLED running a web server and some patterns, I’ve mapped the start and end of each of the letters to do some patterns on specific letters, but I’m considering how crazy it would be to map each LED with x,y coords to do some even cooler patterns. But I might not have enough space for that.
If anyone has some advice on driving this many LEDs, that would be amazing!
Thanks for the awesome library to allow this crazy project to happen.