Hi!
As an autistic it’s hard to reach out for help, but I am ready to start pulling out my hair over this.
TLDR: what should I use to drive 2,106 pixels in a 2D serpentine plane that will allow me to set a current limit of 130A?
I am mainly a hardware guy, never really played with software more than ESPhome allows. I’m pretty sure I could compile a version of WLED to run on my ESP32-S3 but I wouldn’t even know what to open, or what to open it in to get started.
That all being said. I’m not lazy. I’ll learn anything I have to in the quest to make this work. Short of programming a controller from scratch on a Pie, which would be laughably beyond my skill level.
I’ve used WLED for small things a lot and have had a lot of success. However I have run into a problem with the ESP32 not being able to handle what I need it to do. I understand the ESP32-S3 would work but I’ll be a monkys Uncle if I can get one to NOT bootloop with SHA256 mismatches in the log. I was about to buy 4 or 5 different variants hoping one of those would work. Then I remembered there’s a forum. Not a fan of forums, but I thought I would give it a try.
The setup I’m trying to run is a 2D plane (5cm spaced blobs-on-a-string fairy lights) wrapped around a 3D printed structure to support them in the shape of a tree. There are 2,106 pixels in total. I heard the ESP32 can (barely) handle 2,000 so I thought whats another 106, I’ll just slightly reduce the FPS… Well, that’s not going to work.
I’ve got them powered by two 80A supplies that are actively current balanced so the 130A limits is reasonable for my setup.
The problems are mainly the 2048(?) pixel limit of the ESP32, as well as the configuration not allowing me to set the current limits to 130 amps. Limited around 60 amps.
I would love to just get this working but I am not really sure what else to do.
Hopefully there’s a kind soul that can point me in the right direction.
Thanks!
Hi!
Quick update.
I got it booted with the LEDs set to 2106.
A user on here a while back called ALDIY helped me out with a link to a customizable WLED installer. Leaving that previous post triggered that memory. I have to thank him AGAIN for that link!
I am still left left one problem. The power limit can only be increased to 65A and I need 130A. I didn’t see an option to change that within the custom settings for the installer. I did however see a setting for disabling the power limiter by putting in a 0. Is that safe? My system is designed with (roughly) 25% available overhead on each supply, so I am inclined to think it is. Plus it will almost never hit those peaks for most effects and I will rarely be pushing it to 100% white full bright. That might blind me…
Some feedback would be greatly appreciated on disabling that feature or not.
As soon as I get that figured out I’ll post some videos of this. If I can figure that out. I think I saw a section in here for sharing projects…
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I’ve previously written custom code in the ESP32 that handled 4096 pixels at 60fps (with a number of sin/cos computations per pixel), and for it I used the Adafruit NeoPXL8. It has 8 outputs. I had each output driving 512 pixels. (Since then, I’ve switched to wled, but haven’t ported my code yet). How many outputs are you using for the 2106 pixels?
why do you need the current limiter? or what’s your intention there?
an alternative is to limit the global brightness in LED settings.
And there is no such limit in number of LEDs, I recently ran tests on an S3 with 8000 leds configured. Just use multiple outputs.
Just one output for a large 81x26 matrix.
Sorry for the delay. Applying for new career positions, starting school, and dealing with in house vacationing family from other side of the US.
I’ve gotten it working for the most part. It’s been throwing out of effect RAM errors every so often. I tried increasing the allocated RAM all the way to 2 megs and it’s still running out. That should be enough, correct?
I didn’t think it’s possible to combine outputs into one matrix…
That would have made this a bit easier. Entirely my fault for missing that. Thanks for bringing that up! Your correct I don’t need the current limiter. I am really green at programming microcontrollers for the most part so I’m a little apprehensive to change things when I’m not completely aware of what they really do.
you cant just increase the number, anything beyond about 100k will not work. not unless you use latest nightly build.
however, I am working on improving that, should be done in a week or two.