Signal wire length?
Just wondering, in the following scenario…
LED strip #1 has a 1-foot signal wire running from the Arduino/Teensy to the strip.
LED strip #2 has a 50-foot signal wire running from the Arduino/Teensy to the strip.
If you send a command to turn on the first LED in each strip, running both signal wires off the same output pin, would there be a noticeable/visible delay between them?
I’m not a math whiz, but I think at only 49 ft difference between the two, the speed of light has you covered.
On the other hand, capacitance of that long wire might be an issue, given the weak drivers in a microcontroller. might want to buffer the pin just to be on the safe side?
For buffering… short run series resistor of about 220 ohms… for the long run i would press through a 4-20ma driver Rs-488 to overcome the capacitance of the line…
Do you think the type of wire affects the length you can go? For example, 16-gauge speaker wire versus 24-gauge telephone wire versus Cat5 or 6.
It won’t have much affect on the signal, however power supply and ground on the other hand. the longer the run, the heavier the cable, or do something like supplying 5v from both ends, or in the middle, etc.
I have power supply covered. Once the wires are in I can easily test 5v and, if the voltage drop is too great, will switch to 12v supply and add buck converters at the strips. Just want to make sure I can get a good signal to all the components. I don’t know the exact length yet, but the longest signal wire run will be over 50 feet but less than 100. I have coils of phone wire and network cable stashed somewhere, and speaker wire handy, so I’m going to run some bench tests with 100-foot lengths to see what I get. Instead of measure twice cut once I’m hoping for test twice run wires once. 
Once I have “real world” results, I’ll post. I already know that a bunch of speaker wire, in various gauges (as low as 18), soldered together to make a 70-foot length, has an insignificant voltage drop and can power 50 LEDs with a 5v source. But I’ll do a separate post with results from further tests and the actual installation once done.
Thanks for all the opinions/ideas so far!
Looks like you’re all set. John’s recommendation of a serial driver is a good buffer, those chips are designed to drive long narrow gauge cables and put up with all sorts of less than ideal conditions.
@John_Sullivan John, can you give me a specific product name or link for a driver. It’s totally foreign to me so I’d like to research the process and products. Thanks!
Will be happy to in awhile Real world got me… with kitchen flood.
Absolutely no rush. Best of luck with flood!
Ok… so sparkfun.com has a RS485 transceiver breakout board. Use the tx pair for your clock signal through telephone TW-pair… you’ll windup driving the power through about 4ohms of wire @ 60ma per RGB… I would set you source voltage upto 6.5V and add a regulator at the end of the line also. Line capacitance on tje clocking signal will be the reason for the line driver… (break time… lol)