You can use regular seed pixels to do a serpentine matrix. The cons of that approach are:
- You must skip a pixel every row and use a ledmap or live with unequal spacing (5cm pitch vertically and 3.6cm horizontally.
- It requires infrastructure to and bottom. This makes it a bit harder to assemble, move and store.
- Unintuitively, it takes longer and is a more difficult build. The reason is all the power injection into the very confined space you’ll need to do.
I did a tutorial on building that style of matrix a while back. Building a Large LED Matrix (How To)
@Artacus Yes i agree and it did try but it’s not worth it to build a serpentine matrix. But somehow this user could use wled when there is no ic on the top or data return.
Link
Interesting that they are making fixed address with > 256 addresses now as evidenced by that 20x20 curtain.
The cons there are that you can’t make repairs when a pixel dies.
Got some new info. Looks like Ray Wu is selling 36v and 48v individual addressable seeds now. Could be a nice option for a serpentine matrix and not needing injection. Someone said they have 804 seeds 2in connected @ 48v with no power injection.
Interesting. I wonder how efficient they. Seems like they would have to burn off a lot of power.
The PCBs and FPCs carry a lot of current. There are 4x 5mm power traces. And the FPCs don’t have the board to board bottleneck. So power injection isn’t much of a hassle.
Oof, till you throw in shipping they’re 2.5x the cost.
They are cuttable every 9 pixels for 36v and 12 for 48v. They are using groups to drop the voltage for the chips, but are still individually addressable. The down side if 1 dies you have to replace either 9 or 12 of them.
@Artacus thanks for sharing this. I discovered WLED a week ago and I am already up to my neck in lights! This post got me to rethink a serpentine matrix project I had in mind.
Can someone on the thread share a good link that explains the big picture on how to do a big matrix? My understanding is that a single board should drive only something like 600-700 LEDs. I am currently totally unclear on how to use the data line provided in an LED string like this to join multiple matrixes. My experimentation so far has been with only 200 lights driven by one esp32.
You can drive a decent sized matrix from a single ESP32. For best performance, you want to keep it below 500-600 LEDs per data line and 4 data lines. If you look around here, I’ve done 4 or 5 tutorials on different ways to build a matrix. They all have their pros and cons. But building curtains with data-return lines are the fastest and easiest. Building a serpentine matrix is a bit more difficult and hard to get equal dimensions. And building the loop-back curtains was the most difficult/time consuming.
AH HAH! That was the piece I missed until just now … It’s per data line! I thought it was 500-600 LEDs per board. Thank you!
I’m at that point in the hobby where epiphanies still happen frequently. 
I’ll look for your posts!
What’s the latest on availability on the PCB boards. Can’t find anything on Knowshines Ali store and the Kurt and Rod link is just bold now with no link to anywhere.
Disclaimer I’m in Aus. And not sure what is and isn’t available on the AU sites.