Hello everyone. I would like to use the WLED to light up the bottom edge of my pontoon boat and also under the seats. I’ve tried searching around for a commercial solution, but all I can find our lights that just light up as one color. That just seems boring to me and it looks like what can be done with WLED is more what I’m looking for. I know absolutely nothing about this, but just enough to be dangerous. I’ve been watching quite a few videos about this and also trying to dive into some of the how to articles and that type of thing . However, I can find no one that has posted about using this type of a set up on a boat. So here are some of my questions.
I want to have two separate zones if you will. I would like one light set to be below the boat and the other light set to be in the boat. So my question is do I use two different ESP boxes for each zone? Or, do I Use one box but just do the top and the bottom of the boat on different pin settings on the ESP itself?
I see that the ESP boxes use Wi-Fi to connect to your phone app or your computer. That will be fine when I am at the dock and I have access to Wi-Fi. Is there a way to control the lights when I’m actually out on the lake and don’t have the home network available?
I assume that I want to go with 12 V lights. I’m probably gonna run about 48 feet of lights (30 to 60 lights per meter) on the bottom of the boat and about 20 to 30 feet of lights on the top of the boat. Do I need two power supplies for that or is one 12 V supply going to be sufficient? Or, do I even need power controllers since I will be running off of 12 volt batteries?
Thank you for your help and any suggestions are greatly appreciated!
You should have little trouble driving your 2 zones with one ESP32 board. My rough calculation gets a total of 750 LEDs (at 30/m) which should be fine split across two GPIOs.
If the WLED board can’t connect to WiFi, it will create it’s own internal access point so you can connect via your phone/tablet, etc. As a matter of fact, that’s how you program in the WiFi SSID and password you want the board to access when WiFi is available.
12V lights should work fine for your setup although you might want to see what voltage range you get on the boat when the motor is running. Many outboard alternators are not particularly great at keeping the charging voltages under 14V. You may need to look at a buck converter to keep things closer to 12V.
You’ll want to make sure you include a levelshifter for driving each strip.
Additionally you might consider using TxRx pairs for each strip, given that the wiring distance from the board to the strips may be a bit round-about (those will also solve the levelshifter issue). You can see Long Data Lines in the KB for more details.
As a general note, given this is going to be running around (and even in) water, the strips will need to be IP67 type (minimum).
You might also give consideration to keeping the brightness level down. By rough guess your setup could draw 200W+ at max brightness, or close to 20A at 12V. I’m guessing that could be a significant load on the boat’s electrical system.
Thanks for the info! So I just read something else that said you shouldn’t exceeded 16.4 feet on a run of leds at 12 volts. Since I am going to have three of those 16.4 foot sections along the bottom of my boat, should I have each section coming directly off the ESC board on a different pin so that I’m not exceeding that limit? If I did that, then I assume I can program in the WLED app to link those three strands together so that they appear to be one?
What I had assumed that I would be doing would be to actually solder all three of those sections together. But now I am figuring that may not be the best idea. And he thoughts on that? Thanks again.
I think you’re mixing up a number of basic issues here:
As far as Data for addressable LEDs, the major issues are: the distance from the ESP to the 1st LED (see Long Data Lines above) and the total number of LEDs driven by 1 pin on the ESP (not necessarily critical, performance issues for effects). My earlier comment about splitting 750 LEDs across 2 GPIOs was a guess at performance needing to split your strips up. WLED will automatically show you the physically split strip as one “logical” strip. Don’t ignore the Long Data warnings.
As far as Power for LEDs, length becomes a problem because your wiring will experience voltage drops as you get too far. You can solve that by adding more power injection lines to “re-power” your strip as required.
For data, the general idea is to solder it all as one long strip and get your data from the ESP.
For power, the general idea is to try and spread your power connections evenly about your whole setup so there’s sufficient power for all the sections in the worst case (100% White).
Would I be smarter to consider 5v LED’s? I know I would still have the problem of the long leads to deal with, but that would be lees current draw on the batteries.
Actually, going with 5V might make the power distribution issue worse.
The way to look at this is in terms of the worst case power your total number of LEDs require.
If you plan on 700+ total LEDs, that means something like 125W->210W of worst case power draw depending on the particular devices you choose.
That translates to between 10A->18A for a 12V strand, but 25A->40A+ for the 5V strand.
Your setup will only need that much current when you have everything on at 100%, which may not be often. But you have to design the power layout as if it will or you end up with flicker and unreliable operation. Brightness is a matter of choosing a particular kind of LED because it gives the brightness you want.
If you’re unsure, take the risk of trying a smaller piece of what you like and try it out. You can get 1m lengths of 12V LEDs for a reasonable cost. That will give you some idea of what brightness level you can expect. You may need fewer LEDs than you think (?)
In general, design for the worst case scenarios and you won’t have as many operational surprises.