One part of my project is a perimeter along ceiling with 5 1/2 strings total
I have power injection points at every 16 feet what I dont understand is the data wire, do I treat it like 5 sep channels using a data wire for each strip or daisey chain the strips together same data chanel and just inject the 12 volts at every point needed?
Using dig-quad and ws2815 strips
Than you
ScottM
Power for addressable LEDs is all parallel, the strip has a V+ side and a Ground side which can each be thought of as “one wire” with the LEDs attached along the strip. Your power injection points make up for voltage drops from that built in wire.
Data on the strip is serial or “Daisy Chained”, each LED has a Data In and Data Out. On the strip, the main Data In (1st LED) connects to your ESP board then the Data Out of LED 1 connects to Data In of LED 2. This continues with rest of the LEDs until you get to the end of the strip (which will have a Data Out).
How you deal with multiple strips is up to you, if you want you can continue the data chain tying the Data Out of one strip to the Data In of the next. That will use one GPIO pin on your ESP board. Alternatively you can run a separate data line for each strip using 5 GPIOs on the ESP.
WLED lets you treat them both as one long strip in the software. The difference will be in the length of the data runs. The end of one strip is usually fairly close to the start of the next so the Data Out to Data In distance is short. Running multiple data lines back to the controller may create overly long runs that are prone to flickering.
The only other thing to watch would be memory limitations (due to the total # of LEDs) in the dig-quad depending on if it is ESP8266 based. ESP32 devices should be fine.
Sounds like either are ok. I have a similar question. Having my electrician pre-wire my kitchen right now. Planning on using 5v addressables for undercounter lighting.
Have a 1m run → 2m run → 1m run → 2m run
Should I just have one power injection line and data line pulled to the first location and then from that location to the next? Obviously the power injection would need to be continuous and then just running the data into one run and out connecting to the next?
Current plan is to use 60/m, but trying to read as much as I can on here in the next days before choosing.
Without knowing exactly what LEDs you’re choosing, we can only guess as to the actual power requirements.
You’ve posted a total length of 6m @ 60/m =>360LEDs
The general guess on RGB LEDs is about 4.5A/100 LEDs at worst case max white brightness.
My suggestion would be to run 2 power injection lines, 1 to the 1st 1m->2m junction and a 2nd line to the last 1m->2m junction.
That should help spread out any voltage drops.
You don’t specify how far the power supply will be from the strips.
In general the shorter you can make that distance, the better.
The size of wire you need will depend on that distance so that it can supply the ~15A+ across the 2 injection lines.
As far as data, you just need a lighter size pair (24-22AWG) for ground and data connected to the ESP board. You can run the data board from the same 5V supply (using a dedicated power line) or with it’s own smaller 5V supply.