Hey guys. Finishing up my first WLED project. Can anyone shed some knowledge? Trying to feed 2 strings of led’s on my house via a single data wire. My digquad is positioned at the corner of my house and the two strings are running from the corner heading away from each other. Data is traveling in proper directions on strings. WLED is seems to be alternating the strings when numbering the pixels. Hard to pinpoint the pixels I want when trying to create segments. Everything functions nicely but the numbering seems weird and I can’t seem to section off my peak in the front of my house from the side. .
Little confused - Are you running a data line from Each string to One port on the controller (parallel)?
If so, Each string is going to get the same address.
left LED 1: address 1, right LED 1: address 1
left LED 2: address 2 right LED 2: address 2
and so on.
If you want them to be controllable separate you would either need to:
- Use 2 ports on the controller
or - Connect the data from the end of the first string to the beginning of the second string and segment them.
Thanks for the reply. Makes perfect sense the way you explained it. I used 4 conductor wire for that run so I think I should be able to use that extra wire to run a new data line to separate the two sections. Thank you again!
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Hi @Jinx I’m having similar doubt for my setup to run 20 strings x 100 leds/string setup (20 parallel strings), If I use single Esp32 & create 8 channels data output using 8 GPIOs (channel limitation due to availability of level shifters) so can I add 3 strings of 100 Leds/string in parallel connected to single channel like splitting single GPIO output to three strings so that in total I can attach 24 parallel strings and then use “Led Preference Settings” like enabling “Make a segment for each output” & “custom bus start indices” and still get at least 30FPS for display patterns?
Thanks
It will likely work doing 3 strings parallel on each gpio. I have an LED firework that I made that is running 20 strings in parallel off 1 gpio. For sure I would level shift all 8 outputs.
As for your frame rate I’m not sure what you would get. A good test would be to just plug all the values into the settings and even if you don’t have the lights hooked up when an effect is running you can click on Info and it will tell you the FPS you are running at. (do not check fps with solid effect. That will always be low fps as it only updates every 150ms or something like that). I am thinking your frame rate should be fine because that is only like 100 LEDs per port as far as WLED is concerned… To you it’s 300 but the data is only traveling from 1-100 because you are in parallel.
Keep in mind that any strips in parallel on a gpio will always do the exact same thing, no matter what other settings you play with (segments, custom indices…) The only ones that could/would do different things would be each of the 8 gpios (groups).
If you have 3 - 100 LED strips in parallel WLED will always count that as 100 LEDs never 300.
output 1: 100 (really 300 LEDs)
output 2: 100 (really 300 LEDs)
output 3: 100 (really 300 LEDs)
output 4: 100 (really 300 LEDs)
output 5: 100 (really 300 LEDs)
output 6: 100 (really 300 LEDs)
output 7: 100 (really 200 LEDs)
*Brightness limiter settings are not useful with this type of setup as it is not aware of your ‘real’ total LED count. For it to be useful you would need to set a custom voltage value of basically the value of 1 LED x3