Fa-la-la-la-la.....la-la-la-la

[dirknerkle]

I thought it would be fun to animate the refrain from "Deck the Halls." So for 2019, I made this...

https://vimeo.com/312800951

Here's the how-to...

https://www.diychristmas.org/wiki/in...-la-la_display

[yosemite]

Great Project! The Elves must be back from Christmas Vacation! LOL

[jValue]

HI,
Is there a limit to the number of nodes that this could handle? I have some dumb pixels that I wanted to use around my windows and this circuit looks fun to build and useful if it could handle the 100 or so nodes on a window.
Thanks for your time.
Jim

[dirknerkle]

HI,
Is there a limit to the number of nodes that this could handle? I have some dumb pixels that I wanted to use around my windows and this circuit looks fun to build and useful if it could handle the 100 or so nodes on a window.
Thanks for your time.
Jim

You're asking about whether the Pixel-SSR can do 100 nodes? Well, it can handle up to about 2A per channel, so I'm guessing each color of a node would take upwards of 20ma so that's about 100 per channel running at 100% intensity. At less intensity than that you'd probably be okay. On paper anyway....

[jValue]

Thanks. I am thinking I can connect an expixelstick module to this and then make the windows with dumb pixels wireless. Is there a better way to achieve the same goal?
Regards,
Jim

[dirknerkle]

Thanks. I am thinking I can connect an expixelstick module to this and then make the windows with dumb pixels wireless. Is there a better way to achieve the same goal?
Regards,
Jim

That's one way to do it. The Pixel-SSR uses a WS2811 chip and pixel-firmware control. I used a MiWiFi to run this, which is essentially a super-cheap, stripped-down (wayyyyyyyy down) version of an ESPixelStick.

Another way is with a RenStick which is essentially a 4-channel wireless DC-SSR. Either one must be powered by DC power since your dumb pixels are DC. If you changed your mind and went with AC-powered led strings instead of dumb RGB, you could use either a FourStick or a MiniRen8/4 controller, which are both 4-channel wireless controllers for AC lights -- and eliminate the DC power supplies. I have a couple dozen MiniRen8/4's and they've been real workhorses. MiniRens can use either ESP modules or XBee modules for wireless operation.

With dumb RGB, you'd have the same number of "lights" (maybe 100) around a window regardless of the color; with strings, you might make four "super-strings" by bundling four strings of lights together (maybe red, green, blue and white) and you'd have 400 lights around the window instead, which would make it much more full because there'd be 4x the number of lights yet you still have color control.

It all depends on your vision of your display. I always have told folks to take a photo of their home, print out several black-n-white copies in draft mode so the picture is lighter on the paper, and then use markers or crayons to draw their layout vision on them to simulate what the end result might be.