One tip with single-color strips is to feed positive on one end of the strip and negative on the other. This results in equal voltage drop on each LED and eliminates the brightness gradient which may normally occur.
Hey Dave. Great video. Electrical engineer here. You’re right as to the LEDs repeating the data signal to allow it to be passed long distances. Another issue I would mention in the mistakes section is one that I ran into myself. It is advisable to minimize the length of the run of the signal wire between the microcontroller and the first LED. I had an issue where a long run was causing the incorrect data to be displayed on the LEDs. I think it was a combination of transmission line effects coming into play and voltage drop over the long run.
Thanks! You're spot on that the FIRST run makes a big difference. I've seen people adding "decoupling capacitors" or something, but I've been lucky. I send a 3.3V data signal to an LED expecting TTL levels over an old 10' run of speaker wire and somehow it works. Pretty robust!
@@DavesGarage One trick I've seen people use is to cut off a single neopixel and wire it directly to the 3.3V controller. It will provide a nice clean 5V signal for the long cable run to the actual strip. You just have to remember to skip that pixel in your program. The proper way is to use a 74ahct125 or similar buffer, but that's unnecessary extra cost and hassle in almost all cases.
I use the little level shifter PCBs to start my runs. Even retail on Amazon they're inconsequential to the overall cost of a project. I just hide it under the ESP on the perfboard. But yea you can use an LED and just account for it in the program.
@@jonduke4472 You should be careful with those, the cheapo ones with just a pair of BSS138 MOSFETs are pretty low bandwidth. They could easily hurt more than they help. You need the ones with a real level shifter IC (if you need anything at all).
The main issue is that most are using a 3V3 microcontroller and the neopixels are intended for 5V. The 3V3 output works, but with very little margin. A pull-up to 5V at the first LED can help. But there are cheap level shifters available that can step up the signal to 5V. But a normal 74HCT logic chips also works - it runs at 5V, gives CMOS-compatible outputs (higher than 95% of VCC) but is happy with old TTL input levels, so 2.4V is enough. Just don't try 74HC - they expect CMOS logic levels for the inputs too. And as mentioned - a single dummy neopixel can be used to step up the signalling voltage. But that extra pixel hurts a bit since it requires the software to understand there are one dummy output.
Hi Dave, Long time subscriber here. I would like to see a couple short viedoes where you show a final / complete product with all the practicalities included. For example the fire umbrella with wiring details and what products you used to make sure it is weather proof. I went through all of your LED programming videos until something went wrong and its been a year and I have not gotten back to it. (Part of the problem was I used SK6812s and the library doesn't like those.) I also noticed that when I downloaded your projects the version downloaded didn't correspond exactly to the endpoints of the lessons. Anyway please do final summary videoes for your projects, your pathway is fascinating but I eventually want to get to see the final project with every detail. Love your work and your mind! Tom
Hi Dave, Something LED related that you might enjoy looking into is xLights. It's a free opensource tool that allows one to create LED display sequences. xLights will generate a sequence that can be "played" onto an LED controller. The LED controllers generate the ws2811 protocol signals for individually addressable pixels. You can have multiple LED controllers which can all be centrally controlled. I think I saw a WLED controller in your video. xLights can control it. xLights can also control DMX devices, such as movable head spotlights. Just look on youtube for xlights and you will find numerous videos of people's displays and how-to videos for building. The community surrounding xlights is phenomenal.
Indeed. And server PSUs are often available pretty cheaply for old models. It is not uncommon to find them that can supply 50A or more at 12V, and often a couple amps at 5V on the same unit. The external PSUs for Dell 755/760 USFF PCs are quite nice for LEDs. They put out 12V at 20A (if memory serves) and while not waterproof, are tightly enclosed in plastic cases. And their standby current is barely measurable.
The temperature adjustable white LEDs were something I did not know existed. Seeing the example in the video has given me an idea to help solve an issue we have not only with the lighting in the house but the fact my wife is blind in 1 eye and 70% loss of vision in the other. Although she has a lens that helps her to see the lighting no matter what bulb I have chosen can not reach the level of brightness she wants. Basically she's looking for something like the brightness of a hospital. With limited outlets for LED bulbs I can use something like the addressable LED white lights to make her comfort level a bit better. She's taken care of this Vet for 17 years and hopefully a favour like this will be a small token of thank you as I now take care of her the best I can. Thanks! Stay Healthy and Stay Sane!
If you need high power lighting look at panel style lights. I have a panel in my kitchen with a dimmer knob... I originally built it to hang over an indoor garden but moved it to the kitchen in the new house till I can get around to redoing the nasty ceiling and broken florescent light that was there. It can get super bright (200+ watts from the wall going into led's! ....Like 50 regular bulbs all added up) It can nearly blind you out of a room in the daytime if you crank it up. I think the strips would be better suited for area illumination, but may help her if you illuminate paths of travel.
Dave I just finish a project in my kitchen with about 40meters of 24v RGBWW leds strips with 7 zigbee controllers. Every point you made was spot on. You addressed all the point it took me 2 months of research. I will very much recommend your video to anyone looking to do a similar project. The aluminium channels with a defuser are a must, I had a basic channel and a 45 degree channel they are great make a real professional look.
I probably will never get around to it, but I've been interested in doing some kind of LED lighting. Never really looked into the details though. I didn't know there were so many options. Thanks for the detailed information. If I ever do get around to doing something, I'll come back to this video
A few years back, my wife asked me to get rid of the lighted garland that was on top the kitchen cabinets. While having the light on the cabinet was nice, having a pine garland year round was not. I wish your LED light videos, such as this one, had been around then, it would have made figuring it out a lot easier. As I wanted a strip where I could change the color to fit the holiday/season (like green for Saint Patrick's Day), have Alexa integration, and still have okay temperature levels of white, I went with a 5050 RGB strip with Govee controller. It took a bit of finagling and twisting to get the lights to be somewhat close to lighting the ceiling evenly as the cabinets they sit on are not all the same distance from the ceiling. I didn't realize when I was buying the parts that waterproof connectors don't work on non-waterproof strips. Lesson learned. It wasn't quite as simple as I thought, as so many other projects turn out to be. In the end, there is a couple of hot spots and dark spots, but all in all, it looks good. Now I've got to figure out how to hang the RGBIC rope light my teenage Granddaughter got; the double-stick tape they provide doesn't work. The lights get quite warm, which is how to get the double stick tape off the wall, with heat. I'm trying to avoid wall anchors, but that might be next. Keep 'em coming Dave.
Don't forget to insulate your solder joints! When I installed LED strips in my kitchen, I soldered wires to the ends of the strips. Even though I only removed 1-2 mm of insulation from the wires, it was apparent that the exposed conductors could touch each other if the wires were moved around enough to bend the strip a bit. So, I put a blob of clear silicone on each connection to keep it well insulated.
@@DavesGarage if you go with silicone make sure it's the alcohol cure type not the acid cure type that smells like vinegar. It should be in the fine print on the tube. Also there's probably something similar to the screw terminal terminations for 24 volt systems carried by electrical supply distributors.
Thanks...good stuff. I have saved this video in my library under LED...(very engineer thing to do.). Now to figure out how to use your affiliate link...love that someone who knows what they are doing has put the tool and product sets together for me...thank you.
Hey Dave! I am an info tech teacher with a LED project in mind for my classroom. I have a whole array of "ladder racks" suspended from the ceiling in my classroom which holds all of the ethernet cables for all of our lab computers, switches, routers, etc. I plan to map out the entire rack assembly with addressable LED's, and control them with a network connected device which will poll the SNMP data of our core switch and indicate the flow of network traffic over each of the pathways it follows. in the center of the main classroom we have our core switch, where the student will have to punch down their own ethernet cables and make patch cords, etc etc. I'll have the ports on the switch mapped out to which computer they go to, and a map of which branch they will be on, so if "port 7" is downloading fortnight then lights should show a lot of data being pulled from the dmarc to our core switch, and out to the branch where computer #7 lives. I think I want to use 24 volt led strips to avoid the hassle of frequent power insertions, but struggling to find any. Any thoughts on that? Also, how is your LASER TEMPEST project coming along? :D
Hey Dave, you are correct about each LED controller chip repeating the data signal with one caveat. The signal is always repeated at VDD, so one situation that can cause problems is injecting power into a very long run from a second power supply. In this case you would use common ground, and connect the data channel but you wouldn't connect the V+ of the first run to the V+ of the second run. In this case the last LED of the first run could be outputting the data signal at a reduced voltage like 3V (due to voltage drop), while the first LED of the new run will be at a nominal voltage like 5V and will result in data corruption.
Thanks, good point! I always reinject fresh power so that it's never struggling for adequate voltage, and at least in practice that's worked pretty well!
yes, with the 1 wire LED's each led, strips off it's 16 (12?) bits, and then passes on the message re-encoded without the stripped data. this regenerates the signal each time it's read.
you are correct about soldering being a bit of a pain, but I trust the solder far more than the pinch type connectors. I do theatre installs with lots of LED, and when we were using the pinch connectors, there was always an element of fiddling to get good contact. Most often on the center color, there just wasn't good reliable pressure. Failure in the middle of a show wasn't an acceptable thing. Once you do a few hundred, the soldering doesn't take too long, and it can be 100% reliable.
Cool video. I'd say a video showing off powering an installation would the most helpful for a beginner. Power was one of the harder parts for getting it right when coming from fresh.
Great video, Dave. I have been fooling around with 12 volt WS2811 individually addressable led's for about 5 years. One of the problems I had early on was unreliable power supplies, I guess it was just bad luck after buying 10 supplies and 9 were DOA? At my local Goodwill store I found 6 power supplies for the Microsoft Xbox 360E consoles that have 12 volt output and 9.6 amp. These are regulated supplies that also have an internal fan and are reliable.
Most Chinese PSUs are usually at best crap, at worst an imminent danger to your life and your property (see DiodeGoneWild tear-downs). You should only ever buy a brand name (such as Delta or Meanwell) from a reliable source. I was hoping Dave would emphasize this point a bit more in the video...
Dave, a good refresher. I feel a bunch of LED experimentation and videos coming. Your videos come across as very professional. We can see that you have a good microphone, but I would like to see your setup that allows you to read while looking directly into the camera. Obviously, you do significant editing as well. Thanks!
Ah. I found a brief glimpse at 3:38 in your "I Have Autism" video of Nov 1, 2021. You have a low height teleprompter, and just above the camera and a soft white light, all mounted slightly above your eye level.
Thanks Dave. I've been debating what LED strips I need for my motorhome (both interior and exterior). This info helps me a lot. I'm looking forward to "Tron-ifying" it as one of my friends puts it. Maybe I'll post some videos of my own. Anyway, thank you for your help!!
Hi Dave Great video and thank you for spending the time to make it for many of us who are just novices. I wonder if you could explain how strands of LED Christmas lights work in one of your videos.
Hi Dave, SK6812 RGBWW addressable. you missed it :) If im right, data will be have a high latency and lag after 1000 leds. WLED has got more experience about.
The voltage drop is what matters not so much the amperage when talking about distance. An individual LED introduces resistance by consuming power plus the resistance of a wire. Your suggestion of injecting every 2m is good but if you are using 144/m strips that could cause some voltage drop where the 2 strips meet such that you may see a dimming/hue change in the middle of the 2m run. It's better to say power inject every 100 LEDs for 5v or 200 for 12v, pushing it to the limit people can do the calculation of voltage drop and get an exact number if they really want to pinch every penny. 3.3v or greater will power most LEDs some specific colors require higher voltage, this is why when voltage drops in an RGB LED it appears redder, because red LEDs only require 1.7-2v whereas green and blue are 2.1-3.3v. 6:24 You are correct that each WS2812B will amplify the data signal so you don't have any worry about data loss or corruption. There is a timing delay between the signal so for faster refreshes you may want to limit the number of LEDs. I'd be curious to see tests on your 1000 length runs of how fast you can refresh and if you see any delays. EDIT: Should have watched the whole video before commenting. You covered voltage drop later in the video. :)
I think send as many amps, as far as they will go along the strips to the point where they are warm to the touch so they act as heating. In conjunction with top grade smoke detectors!
from the WS2812 spec sheet: "After transmission for each pixel，the signal to reduce 24bit. pixel adopt auto resha ping transmit technology, making the pixel cascade number is not limited the signal transmission, only depend on the speed of signal transmission."
10amps per Meter? I hope you have good fire insurance. I work primarily with 5054 based strips which arw among the highest current available and at the typical 16.4 feet with 600 LEDs. I try to run no higher than 3amps or so. This is achieved using a variable voltage supply. At even 4amps the strip gets too hot to touch and I'm well north of 12 volts and just feeding the resistors between each set of 3 LEDs. I strongly suggest staying at around 11.5 volts for safety. Honestly, the 12 volt spec for these strips is bad. Its too high forcing the use of inline resistors and hence wastes power and causes heat. The more efficient the LED the lower the forward voltage wich means more resistance is required. Its dumb.. Ditch the o Unline resistors and use a 10 volt supply I say. Radical improvement in efficiency. Addressable LED strips are typically lower density and hence dont have that much of an issue, but many are still being over driven. I build some pretty cool stuff with high current Crees and Bridgelux. Strips are fun, but horribly inefficient, and their lack of current regulation can be dangerous.
Yes, the data signal gets regenerated. Each LED strips off data and passas more data along to the next LED. If it had been the same signal sent to all LED, then each LED would have needed an address to know where in the pulse train it would find the correct RGB information.
Two camera angles? Add the second camera to the in truck skits from previous videos and this channel is out of control! I'm not sure what Dave is thinking with all this fancy production. Keep this up and I may end up telling even more people about this channel. 🤣
Hey Dave, great video. I have about 32ft (10m) of 5v 3pin rgb addressable leds. What kind of inline amplifier should i use? Not really finding anything. All i find is the 4pin 12v stuff...😢 Thanks in advance! Update: Nevermind! Figured out the remote had options to incr/decr the number of pixel points... Whew! Does help to keep the minimalistic instruction cards...
I actually did a project for this. I got circular ring of rgbw 24 leds, individually addressable, and implemented a clock using a 2811 library, modding an example.
The problem with one Data signal for very long strips is that you need to send more data trough this wire... this results in less frequent updates of the colors.
There is one interesting choice: SK6812 WWA, addressable white LEDs. Also you should avoid analog RGB strips with separate red-, green- and blue-LEDs, these will look awful in any scenario because density gets too low.
Perfect timing, I'm in the middle of replacing old strips with better addressables. Im still pondering if i should go with Open RGB for greater compatibility or write my own for better integration with HomeAssistant+esp32+EspHome
I got caught up in the difference between 2811 and 2812. The 2811 has 3 LED's per controller, and the 2812's are one per controller. It didn't make much difference in my application, but it's something I'll look out for in the future.
Great video as always, Dave! One thing that has held me back from playing too much with LED's is possible RFI. I am an amateur radio operator and I wonder if anyone has experience with these in an RF environment - either generating noise or being susceptible to RF. Presumably FCC type-15 acceptance saves us but... Thanks!
I suspect there is hardly any interference as the handled voltage is only 5 volts DC. High AC voltages are the ones that tend to cause noticable RFI. The data line uses extremely little current so don't expect problems from those either.
If there is interference, would it usually end up being the switching supply? Or a low quality switching supply? I would think swapping to a transformer based supply would clean the air up...
The addressable strips must produce a bit of noise (not sure how much) but the non-addressable ones should be completely RF silent assuming they are run from a clean source. Using PWM dimmers to change colors will also produce some noise but this is probably less and can be managed by changing the slew rate. LEDs should also be immune from noise but the data lines for addressable ones would be most likely to be susceptible. Shielded cables would probably help with that.
You can buy higher density RGB strips, 240/m and 300+/m but they are harder to work with and fearfully expensive compared to even the 144/m strips. Might be useful for certain projects, though.
Experimenting with a ws2812b strip with 300 leds at the moment. I turned it into a 50x6 matrix with the data line zigzagged. the odd lines are normal direction, even lines have to be filled backwards to save on long wires having to be used. wrote the driver from scratch in python, still a work in progress. Although the core renderer is ready and works nicely and is quite fast for a pi pico.
There are several methods to do that. Since some libraries sometimes just don't do the trick (but are otherwise great like FastLED) or you might have an unusual geometry, I simply doublebuffer stuff. So you can take the full effect rendering part others use, even with fullspeed 2d rendering stuff and finally I use a copy loop to transfer that standard left to right buffer info my geometry. That way I can even render "holes" in the strip, like I do have in my mancave when the surrounding wall light has cutouts for the window or door. The effect then does not "jump" from one side of the hole to the other one but will just smoothly appear on the other side when it should if there were leds in between.
@@larsfriedrichs8924 Yeah I built in a frame buffer with itś own virtual size larger than the led display itself so I can just build a number of things to display in one go and then just show a part of it (display size) at any time, it enables scrolling but also for example alternating frames without any more rendering, just writing the relevant data to the leds.
Hi Dave, at 6:37 you talk about the LEDs uC. What always interested me: Is there an actual uC inside of each LED, or is it an ASIC or similar? If it’s an uC, may we be able to flash different firmware into it, or is it write-protected? What do you think?
As to why drop power every meter versus 2? If you want there to be more light in relation to power used that's wasted in the form of heat in the whole system, then you'll want it more frequent. The wiring between lights is likely to more readily dissipate waste heat to where you don't blatantly obviously observe it, but the power is used and dissipated, even so. If it works within your desired objectives for brightness with power drops less frequent and you don't mind that tradeoff for some reason, then having less frequent power drops is less costly to build. So, there's your question answered!
Just don't try to create a WS2812B project allowing you to set colors remotely over the Bluetooth/internet using a Raspberry Pi... Never thought I'd have to dive so deep into the Linux kernel for my first project. Just to make a mother's day gift. Y_Y
Regarding the data signal being relayed, I don't see anyone else making this observation. It is most certainly refreshed at each LED, that's how they are addressed. The address is the number of LEDs from the signal injection, there's nothing different about each LED. Each LED re-transmits the data packet with the address number reduced by one. Once an LED gets a data packet with the address zero, that colour data is for that LED & nothing is re-transmitted.
Close… at least with the most common types I've seen, e.g. WS2812, there is no address as such, or at least it's never transmitted. Each LED simply acts as if it's the first in the run, taking the first color in the data stream and passing only the remaining data to the next LED.
why is it that Microsoft programs pop-up on top of all other programs when i am for example busy one that is already open. that is really annoying whem i am for eg typing. and can that problem be resolved?
Injecting power once every 2 meters (@5:10) is good enough because you'll most likely never have ALL the LEDs in an RGB strip at 100% other than short periods. You shouldn't drive LEDs at full brightness anyway since they wear out faster that way.
I'm looking to set up some lighting my room and on my desk with LED strips, likely 12v ARGB strips specifically. I've seen some certain off the shelf solutions of ARGB lighting with a noticeable amount of flicker, and I'm wondering if that flicker tends to be caused by the power supply used (i.e. poor power quality, large peak-to-peak voltage fluctuations and such), rather than the nature of the ARGB signal. Does anyone happen to have any knowledge of this?
As an aside, I'm actually intending to use my computer power supply's 12v rail as the primary power supply for these strips, so the quality of power delivered will be extremely high as I have a top end PSU.
I did have a question for you, but wanted to wait for a video such as this. For my first custom run I was attempting to run some 5050 strips off my asus motherboard with extensions and such. 12v to 12v ran just fine until I tried to add some custom runs to the line. It worked until I crossed red to green because of a bad solder point and fired both 12v headers on the motherboard leaving me with only 5v headers left. I've been looking for a way to convert 5v up to 12v so that I could run a single color signal from the 5v header to have it come out on the 12v. Any recomendations? I've been debating on just redoing the runs with WS2812B's and an amplifier but for ambient lighting that wouldn't really fit the astetic.
4. The most technically ambitious, but extremely pointless alternative: use an Arduino to recover the R, G and B levels from the 5V signal (directly by counting the PWM pulses or indirectly by sampling a low-pass filtered signal with the A/D) and output it as a WS2812B signal.
@@DavesGarage I don't know what the UEC is, but the American NEC and Canadian CEC don't automatically exempt these systems. Definitely don't if the power supply is more than 100 W. 12-V, 10-A systems come under the code. And the power supplies absolutely need UL/CSA/equiv listing since they are 120-V. There is a decent article on the Waveform Lighting web site entitled "Do LED strip lights require UL listing?" The article does not describe the Canadian situation. Because every jurisdiction has legislated that the CEC is law, it is, in fact, illegal to install equipment that does not meet code. Electrical codes are primarily about fire prevention, as opposed to shock protection. (Emphasis on "primarily.") You can easily start a fire with 5 V. People ignited cigarettes for decades with 12-V car lighters.
@@DavesGarage I agree it's annoying. I want to be able to watch something when it appears in my stream, not have it shoved in my face 2 days in a row without me being able to click / view it. SUPER annoying.
Depends what specific kind of LED TV you have. If it's just "LED" or "QLED", then the LED in the name refers to the *backlight* of the TV, not the pixels, which are just plain standard LCD. If it's "OLED", then the pixels are indeed individual LEDs that each emit their own light, but other than the name and that they both create light, OLEDs have little in common with traditional LEDs. There's also "MicroLED" TVs, which are traditional LEDs for each pixel, but those are *incredibly* expensive (hundreds of thousands of dollars).
Dave I just finish a project in my kitchen with about 40meters of 24v RGBWW leds strips with 7 zigbee controllers. Every point you made was spot on. You addressed all the point it took me 2 months of research. I will very much recommend your video to anyone looking to do a similar project. The aluminium channels with a defuser are a must, I had a basic channel and a 45 degree channel they are great make a real professional look.
