Hi!
I have a setup of 1352 12v RGB Pixels LEDs using ESP32 going around the house. I am having problems controlling LEDs after say the first 600 LEDs, around where I have power injected. I’ve played around with attaching the 2 spare wires at the beginning of the strand to additional power and it seems the additional ground wire is isolated from the rest of the wires somehow. Weird.
I guess the cables are too long for the data wire on the power injector , shortening them helped get the signal moving along but it still has issues.
SO I have created additional NODEMCU WLED boards, with the SN74AHCT245 chips with the intention of having WLED sync them. This is where I am getting lost.
Do I do segments?
Do I do grouping? Spacing?
Do I make each controller their own segments?
I want them to run as a continuous string. End of one Segment? / Group? picks up on the next one, etc.
The data signal is transformed and amplified at each pixel. So it doesn’t matter how far away they are from the controller only how far they are from the previous pixel. Do you have a big gap between the two strands?
And power injection is just additional 12v and ground feeds. The data needs to flow from one strand to the next not along the feed wires, if that’s what you’re saying.
“The data signal is transformed and amplified at each pixel. So it doesn’t matter how far away they are from the controller only how far they are from the previous pixel.”
That’s what I thought. Not sure what is wrong. I have a few areas where the distance is 4 feet between LEDs and there is no problem. This power injector thing I made is only about 9 inches… I made a few of them and they do the same thing. 3 wires. Red (+12), White (Data), Blue (GND) on the LED. Made a connector that passes thru Data and GND on to the new strand and Power and Ground from the added power supply, while removing the Red (+12) from the previous strand.
So I figured I could just replace any where I wanted to use a power injector with a NodeMCU running WLED. Creating a number of complete (?) segments. How do I make WLED pass on to the next WLED NodeMCU to make it seem like it is a single continuous string?
I wonder if it could be power related? Some effects work while other’s dont. I can do all white but some are more Yellow than White and are no where near the problem area.
Here is a picture of the power connector on the LED strand.
I’ve done the power injector 2 ways. First way is through the black connector as explained above. When that was producing errors, I thought I’d use the 2 unconnected wires for power and cut the Red wire on the black plug. Connecting power to the Red and Blue wires did nothing other than power the strip. Out of frstration I tied the the blue wires together and it worked (still with some errors). So I was saying the unconnected blue wire in the picture seems to be an isolated ground. That is how I left it. Walked away in frustration. And it was cold.
Over night I made 3 NodeMCU, power, LED power, and level shifter, also added a jumper to pick weather the SN74 whatever chip takes input from the NodeMCU data pin or act as a repeater and take the data from the previous strand. Just move the jumper and remove the NodeMCU to pass the data signal to the input of the level shifter.
On that note, how do I make WLED pass the LED / Sequence on to the next WLED NodeMCU so that it looks like one long string of LEDs (which it is ). I want to light 3 LEDs and move them all the way to the end along 1252 LEDs, and back again.
You don’t have to do anything special. WLED will treat it like one big stand by default. Just tell it how many pixels you have. That your colors are changing leads me to believe it may be a power issue. Are you using automatic brightness limiter? If you’ve got 1250 LEDs and didn’t configure the amperage correctly, it would make them pretty dim.
I think you’re right, it is//was related to power. Adding in more power bricks has stopped the ‘noise’ from occurring on the run. Now I am noticing other things like on Theater mode, only half the lights work. If I select Reverse under Segments, it reverses the half of the lights that are working. It was working then started to do this. Can’t get it to NOT do this now. Also Sync with another WLED instance and it does the same thing. One run has 298 LEDs the other has 1252. Exactly half.
