Outdoor durability
Short version: two 12v WS2811 “pixel strings” survived four months outside in (record-setting) Boston winter weather, with no noteworthy problems. If you have an outdoor-installation-durability story to tell, please chime in!
More details in my case this time: I strung up two hundred “pixel nodes” (12v, WS2811, http://m.aliexpress.com/item/1032319604.html ) in a tree in our front yard around December 1st, 2014 and just took them down today (April 5th, 2015). That’s just over four months, 125 days or so.
The lights ran 24/7, in rain, snow, hail, snow, sleet, snow, fog, snow, sun, snow, wind, and snow. Did I mention the snow? (Boston set an all-time record for total snow, as well as all kinds of other weather records this winter. It was … amazing.)
For the first six weeks, the lights ran a custom modified “holiday twinkle lights” animation - fairly dense light, maybe a 20% duty cycle. For the rest of the time, they ran a slower, less dense variation, maybe with a 10% duty cycle. Brightness was 255 at all times.
The microcontroller and power supply were in DIY’d weatherproof enclosures, and there’s no sign that anything leaked. This was what I thought would be the problem, so this was what I was extra careful on.
But basically everything just worked!
I suspect that the plastic insulation on the pixel strings would start to suffer a bit if it were left up and exposed to the summer sun at length, but for a couple of months of wet and cold and wind – there were no problems that I saw.
I know that the big-Halloween-decor folk and big-Holiday-decor folk have lots more experience in terms of durability of gear – maybe you’d like to chime in and add your success (and horror) stories?