Addressable LEDs for Xmas. Year Two.

[TimG]

Original 10cm square matrices now rebuilt with 5cm addressable bead LEDs. Four upstairs windows and glass panel next to front door as before. I tested the upstairs LEDs with a Dig-Quad running WLED v0.15.0_b4 and they are just awesome. I'll add some images in December when i fire them up in anger

Hmm, the downstairs windows look bare...

While I was at it, I decided to make illuminated house numbers. White LED's ? Nah, more Know Shine addressable bead LED's but with a 2.5cm spacing. I used black hollow metal numbers from AliExpress and ran a loop of LED's inside each number with hot glue to keep them in position, and cabled them from one number to the next. Quite hypnotic with a £5 ESP32 running WLED and a command to Alexa to turn the house numbers on. I've set it to default to white at 50% brightness so not to scare the neighbours too much

[TimG]

So last years build consisted of upper and lower spring loaded curtain rods inside each window with acrylic beads strung vertically between them to attach the LED's to. The LED strings were approximately 100 beads long with a 10cm spacing, so I was able to put the acrylic strings 10cm apart and run the LED bead strings up one acrylic string and down the next in a serpentine manner and tyrap them on. 8 high x 12 wide per window in four adjacent windows. This worked well until an LED failed. That was time for snipping out the errant LED and Wago connectors to fit a spare.

This years plan with the 5cm beads seemed much better thought out until it wasn't. The new bead strings with four wires mean you don't have to make serpentine matrices as you can loop back the Data line down the 4th wire by connecting them at the far end. The problem with serpentine matrices and a single string was that you sometimes had to sacrifice one LED at the top or bottom if >10cm gap was required, and tell WLED what you had done. Now I can make a matrix that is either top fed or bottom fed and no designed in dead LED's. The discussion for this was on the WLED Discourse channels, and those guys were dealing directly with the Chinese manufacturers to get the LED's they needed to build these curtains. Awesome work guys.

So what went wrong ? I followed the info about which LED's to buy and ordered 200m of 5cm bead LED's and 200 RJ11 plug and socket connectors. I already have the crimp tooling. But the RJ11 plugs didn't fit the new LED's. Then I found the text where you needed to specify ultra thin insulation if you wanted to fit RJ11 plugs. Aaarrghh

OK, plan Z from outer space. I took on the MUCH longer task of soldering plugs onto every vertical drop, and building socketed looms to go at the top or bottom as required. With the new 5cm LEDs replacing the old 10cm LED's that meant I could move the verticals closer for the four upstairs windows, and for those windows the TOTAL LED count went from up from (8h x 48w)=384 LED's to (15H x 56W)=840 LED's. These LED's only take 10mA when fully on (R,G and B on full brightness to make white) then for patterns or colours you don't need as much power as you think. The simple calculation for maximum current is 10mA x 840 = 8.4A. You would probably get away with 5A and set the psu current limits in WLED, but I bought 10A psu's. Last year they looked good on full brightness and white colour. This year they light the room up

So this year I just need to have a spare vertical string for each window size. If an LED fails, you swap out one vertical by unplugging it.

Now what am I going to do with all these spare LED's

[IAmATeaf]

Do you have any pics, simple guy here and pics of lights would keep me interested

[TimG]

I'll have a rummage around and see what I can find:

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So these are flexible strings of addressable LED's. Each individual pixel can be any colour and any brightness, all controlled by something as simple as an ESP32 (£5?) running WLED (Free) and controllable from a phone, PC or even via MQTT or Home Assistant. Needs a stable 5VDC psu. The top row shows the 10cm LED's that I used last year - see previous thread for videos. Note in those videos that the LEDs look excellent to the eye but a bit washed out on the mobile phone video. Will try adjusting camera settings this year.
So with the 10cm LED's I made serpentine (Up/Down) rectangular matrices with each LED 10cm away from the next to fit in my upstairs windows. They came in approx 100 LED length (Some were 99 making a 10W x 10H matrix difficult). Each LED only takes 10mA maximum (5VDC) at full brightness (White = RGB ON) so 1A MAX per 100 LED's. 3A PSU's were purchased and did fine. The upstairs windows (4 off) had a 10A psu and a more elaborate commercial controller with fusing (Dig-Uno) running WLED.
The second row shows the 5cm LED's. The keen eyed amongst you will notice they have four wires. The usual three wired types like the 10cm LED's have 5VDC, Data, 0VDC. The fourth wire isn't connected to anything, and so you can run a single string, and use the fourth wire to bring the Data line back to the start, ready for the next string. This is how the 5cm LED's can be set up with all of the connections at one end, and no serpentine arrangement. WLED allows this as a simple matrix too. All upstairs windows now have 5cm spacing between each LED so quite an improvement in resolution.
The third row are 2.5cm LED's. These are the ones I bought for the illuminated house numbers. Hollow metal numbers from AliExpress, hot glue, and yet another ESP32. Three wire only, so no data return for the second number. To make that work, I looped the LED's around the numbers and back to the start. A bit of four core wire, and all is well.

Right, time to start looking for those darn reindeers

[TimG]

Now the nights are drawing in, it's time for those 2.5cm LEDs to show you what they can do with the 51 numbers. Here is a short YouTube video showing them playing the WLED "Blend" effect. Psychedelic man
As usual the camera cannot do justice to what I can see with my eyes, it makes them far too bright. Given a vote of approval by the pizza delivery guy as he couldn't see other house numbers in the dark

Static image ? OK:

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[TimG]

And now in December I finally managed to find the Pro settings on my mobile phone to reduce the sensitivity of the camera. Have a look at this video to see the results. No prizes for guessing which windows have the 5cm LED's and which one has the 10cm LED's

Looks like we are having a rave at TimG's place