Would this be ok to run 2m’s of WS2812B’s off a 12v Lipo battery?
http://www.ebay.com/itm/351091547355
5A/0.06 = 83, so you’d be good to run that many pixels off one of these. How dense are your strips?
60 per meter
It doesn’t say what current it can output at what voltage. Are your strips set up for 5V or 12V?
In that case, I’d recommend you get a supply designed to supply 5V. The 60 LEDs / meter WS2812 strips consume about 14.4 W / meter at full brightness. For 2M, that’s about 30W, or 6A at 5V. You want a dc-dc converter with at least 5V 6A. I would recommend a 5V 10A if you plan to run at full brightness. Extra capacity never hurts.
Thank you very much! Really do appreciate it. I’ll keep looking
What’s your application, btw?
I am mounting them on a quad-copter. So weight and current draw are important.
Some kind of POV trick? Neat! Be aware you don’t need to run them at full brightness though. FastLED’s setBrightness() allows you to scale power draw pretty linearly I’ve found, and you can even set a max power draw explicitly with the new features in the FastLED 2.1 branch.
So your 5A DC-DC converter above would be able to power 120 LEDs at about 70% of full power on full-white with setBrightness(180), which to a human eye is still pretty damn bright. If your patterns are less than 70% saturated, you won’t lose any brightness at all.
Though note if you are doing POV tricks, setBrightness might not be the right solution, it works by flashing the LEDs really quickly which you might be able to see with the eye, or especially a camera. You’ll have to experiment.
I’d suggest using a 5V UBEC such as the ones sold by Hobbyking. They are efficient, very cheap, and lightweight. Maybe use 2 of them as I’m not sure there are 6A ones available (3A definitely). Not sure you should run two of them in parallel, but you can split the strip at some point and power each half from separate UBECs.
I’ve seen UBECs up to 10A, but that seems the limit. Also a reasonable choice.
(Note googling for “30/40/60A UBEC” gets results, but for 30/40/60A motor speed controllers with a built-in UBEC, spec’d for about 3A.)
Fast moving drone + POV = awesomeness!
I second the idea of a UBEC; they are designed for use on planes and multi-rotors and work a treat. Also, many of the speed controllers have BEC built in and you can drive LEDs from those, depending on the way you wire up to your flight controller (although I’m not sure how accessible that would be on a DJI Phantom style quadcopter, all my quads/hex/tricopters are self assembled so it’s easy to adapt the wiring).
Depending on the code you are running, you can cut the current requirements quite a bit, if you don’t have full white, and if you limit the max brightness it will lower the requirements, and still look good in low light conditions.
And one other thing, be careful with your patterns. I’ve got an R/C car which I did in the early days with a PIC chip, 64 LEDs and some great effects, but in the dark it could be undriveable because you couldn’t see which way it was going when all the lights are cycling in a KITT/Cylon fashion!
The quad should look great at night time, and even better in the dusk; nice project!
Currently trying to build a Tarot 680 hex with a Pixhawk controller. God this stuff adds up fast $$$.
@Mike_Eden Yes, it can be an expensive hobby. Since I discovered Hobbyking, I find it hard to stop buying bits and pieces, so I now have an assortment of multirotors. One good thing about making your own is that you can always get another frame and transfer the electrics from one copter into another if you fancy a change or new project, but I inevitably say I’m going to do that, but end up buying more motors, ESCs and gear to make another complete drone 