Hi everybody. I’m new here and new to WLED as well. I’ve looked over all the projects that others have done and they look fantastic!
My latest project is a computer controlled cocktail robot that is controlled by an Android app that contains a database of all the drink recipes. It holds 18 bottles of liquor on three rotating carousels and can pump 14 mixers from a modified mini-fridge.
I want to dress it up now with a video display at the front of the unit. The area for the display is U-shaped that wraps around the front of the chassis. It is about 2 meters in length and about a meter in height. I would like to use led strips with 60 leds/meter so to keep the pixel pitch the same in the x and y, I will need 60 strips of 2 meters in length. This works out to 7200 leds.
My questions: 1- Is it reasonable to expect to drive 7200 leds at a decent frame rate?
2- What would the recommended hardware setup consist of?
I’m sure there’ll be more questions but this is a start.
I looked at xlights briefly but don’t understand how I can make 2D matrix animations like in Wled. Does xLights have built in animations? Can I download them from somewhere?
Thanks for your help.
Thanks for the link. After watching, I went down the rabbit hole further and found out a few more things;
WLED, indeed, cannot drive more than 4000 leds efficiently (or at least at an acceptable frame rate)..
If I use a commercial pixel controller in the ~$200 range, I still need a separate computer to run xLights on it.
I may be able to run the controller with an SBC (RasberryPi, Beagle bone) running Falcon Player (FPP) software.
There is a 16 channel (1024 pixels/channel) Art-net compatible controller on Amazon for $139 that has an SD card but I’m not sure if you can play effects and sequences from it standalone. I can’t find anyone using this online so I may just get one of these and test it out to see.
You would create sequences in xLights and load them to the SD card on the controller and the beagle bone would have FPP installed on it and would play the sequence. How you trigger the sequence would be the next question… Or you could run FPP from a raspberry pi and could add triggers to it on it’s other GPIO pins. I am not sure how many triggers FPP allows and I can’t check because my Pi is powered down right now.
You could also use a few esp32’s and a Pi running FPP (and a wifi router). xLights to create the sequences, the Pi to play them and stream the DDP data to the Esp32’s vie the wireless. You would need to look into triggering the sequences. A good place to ask would be the xLights Zoom room. The people there are very helpful. **Note to split the matrix over several Esp’s you would need to use a shadow model in xLights (I think).
Another option: use a cheaper 8 port controller and add on a differential receiver for the extra ports, but then I would guess you would be getting close to the cost of just buying the 16 port version.
Thanks for the insight and the recommendation of the Zoom room. Being new to all this has my head spinning and it’s great to meet people willing to help.
With the number of leds I want, the scope of this thing is ballooning so I may cut down on the resolution just so I can use a common wled controller and keep the led count under 4000. I have a 5 volt, 90 A power supply that I thought would work but soon realized I would need 3X that for 7200 leds. I am going to order some parts and do a test to see if the resolution will be okay for what I want. Instead of 60 leds/meter, I’ll use 30/m and see how it looks at 60 x 30 instead of 120 x 60.
