Advice for ceiling with LED matrix

Questions
1

Hi,

I’m looking to create a matrix of addressable LEDs on a ceiling that I can run custom animations on. I’m thinking of putting fluff over top the LED strips to create a cloud ceiling effect.

I’m a total noob when it comes to lighting stuff, so I have a couple questions:

  1. What would be the recommended density of LED strips? I imagine I’d run them side-by-side, but how close together should I space them in order to have enough resolution for some interesting animations like circular waves and what not? I don’t want to do any overly detailed animations, but it would be cool to support basic geometries and circular stuff. The density in one direction would be determined by the density of the LED strip itself, and the density in the other direction would be determined by how far apart I space adjacent LED strips. Is it important that these densities are close or match?

  2. I’m guessing I’ll need a lot of LED strips… the ceiling is ~14’ wide and depending on what we decide, 15-22’ long. Am I right in understanding that ESP32 controllers running WLED only support up to 10 strips? Will I need more than that? If so, should I just use multiple controllers? Will it be tricky to power that many LED strips? Any recommended controllers in particular?

  3. Is it possible to achieve low enough latency to do cool animations when controlling the LED strips remotely over WiFi programmatically via API?

  4. Any other general/relevant advice is welcome :slight_smile: Thank you!

2

I have seen few cloud ceiling effect. in wled discord and result is amazing but not easy to do , might be take a look at some of those examples Discord .
For your other questions

  1. Density of LED strips , this would depend of the total leds really and how big is the matrix , effects are better on a bigger matrix but again you do not want to go really high with wled , so 32x32 is ideal or 64x64 might be the max to go for to keep things stable ,( i do not think 64x64 will be stable )

  2. Yeah 10 pins per esp32 so 10 strips so if you need more then multiple esp32

  3. Could depend on your network setup , if you have a dedicated network for your light then should be fine ( might not be fine with a lot of leds )

4.As i never did this exact project my only recommendation is to keep fire hazards in mind