Design layout advice plz

[877]

Hello all,

New to WLED but quite familiar with mains wiring and Arduino projects, I have a Pi4 running MQTT/Node Red and many ESP devices dotted around the home. Maybe then this will seem quite basic, but I wanted to check first.

Here’s my proposed garden layout below. The lines are LED strips and the X’s represent where I think the MCU(s) will go.

First I’m wondering about the cable lengths from MCU to strips, power will be ok with a larger cable for volt drop, but data will be a problem over that distance? Should I use separate twisted pair cable for the data line? Would shielded ethernet cable suffice?

Next, if using multiple MCU’s, how are they synchronised to each other?

Finally, the end goal is for all LED strips to synch and react to music. I need to read a lot, i.e. how is the audio signal fed into the WLED software? Which audio sources are supported?

I anticipate general control will be via MQTT, most likely just coming on/off at certain times.

Any tips or general pointers would be greatly appreciated!

[blazoncek]

Check @Quindor videos and website as he did a lot of experimentation regarding cable dimensions and lengths.

WLED devices can be synced in many various ways with or without external control. External could be MQTT or Home Assistant integration, internal could be Sync feature or DPP virtual LEDs.

As for audio reactivity, 0.14 features AudioReactive usermod which needs to be compiled into the binary. Once there, it will allow certain effects to react to sound input via microphone. The best choice would be I2S digital microphone like INMP441. @srg74 provides such binaries as well as controllers with audio input. You can also check @Quindor controllers.

Finaly WLED has internal timers and time scheduled presets which allow independent operation.

Also familiarize yourself with KB.

[877]

Thank you so much for the comprehensive reply, I will do some further reading