I’m planning to buy some strips to use it with WLED. On these strips the LEDs have a distance of 10cm. However, I want to have a distance of just 3cm. So my idea is to use 3 strips lay them of with a little offset and interleave it.
The question is: Can I setup WLED in a way that is handles the 3 interleaved strips as one long one?
Here is some ASCII art to demonstrate the mapping:
Physical layout, ("O" marks the LED):
Strip 1: O_________O_________O_________O
Strip 2: O_________O_________O_________O
Strip 3: O_________O_________O_________O
Virtual mapping (numbers indicate the ID in the virtual strip):
Strip 1: 1_________4_________7_________10
Strip 2: 2_________5_________8_________11
Strip 3: 3_________6_________9_________11
Absolutely.
You can wire them up physically so that the end of Strip1 connects to the start of Strip2, and the end of Strip2 connects to the start of Strip3. You’ll want to reverse the DIn order of each strip to make them easier to interconnect without long data wires.
OR
Use an ESP32 device and connect each Strip to it’s own GPIO pin (maybe easier when you get to larger #'s of LEDs???).
Either way they’ll look like a single string of length 12 (from your example).
Now, the “secret sauce” to make it work as you’d like (interleaved): ledmap.
Using an ledmap file, you can specify the Logical order to address Physical LEDS.
Your example would use an ledmap file like {“map”:[0,4,8,1,5,9,2,6,10,3,7,11]} (for the ESP32 version) while your segments and effects are just numbered 0-11 to treat the LEDs as if they were in physical order.
And what’s really cool in the later versions of WLED, you can have multiple ledmap files to change how you deal with your physical LED layout.