50 Feet of LEDS on Room Ceiling - NO POWER INJECTION 😮

so I would say the two most common questions I've been asked over the past year is how much power do I need if I wanted to do x y z and the other is if I wanted to put lights around my entire room how would you do that in today's video I'm going to address what I feel is the biggest misunderstanding when it comes to powering addressable LEDs as well as what I would use and how I would set up 15 meters or approximately 50 feet of LED strips now I've been waiting for a project like this to use a new diffuser Channel I found on Amazon because there's one thing that makes this very unique which will be perfect for larger installs which I'll touch on in a moment but this channel itself comes in different colors and I went with the white one since I wanted to blend in with my walls as best as possible so one thing that's cool about this particular product is that you can purchase these pre-cut 90 degree angle pieces which will save you from having to do it yourself using a hand or miter saw and as you can see these do create a near perfect corner but what I think is best about these channels and why it'll be perfect for larger installs is that you can get this separate 30 meter roll of the milky white cover for this profile which means you can create one continuous and seamless bead of light without having any unwanted light shining through the cracks for individual sex the diffusers are pressed up against each other moving on to the lights and I'll be using some of my favorite 5 volt SK 6812 strips from BTF lighting and for this project I'll need three rolls which will add up to 15 meters or close to 50 feet next I'm going to want to cut off the lead wires I could take the time to remove just the wires but to keep things moving I'm just going to snip off the first led on each strip and here I'm going to be unraveling the spool and cutting off the last LED on each strip and again really just wanting to get those wires removed from the end so for this step I'm going to be taking some 18 gauge silicone wires and cutting off three sections each being approximately eight feet in length these will then get connected to what will be the beginning of my LED strip now before moving on I want to thank the sponsor of today's video Aura so this is me signing up for their free 14-day trial and during the setup process one of the many things they do is scan the internet for data Brokers that have your personal information these data Brokers then make a fortune selling your information to spammers scammers and other entities that want to know more about you now Aura was able to find 30 such instances of my personal information being in the hands of these companies then with one click Aura sends out a notice to have my information removed from their systems which they are legally required to do when asked their all-in-one platform offers anti-virus protection credit monitoring credit lock financial transaction alerts secure VPN identity protection parental controls 24 7 us-based customer service and much much more I'll leave a link in the description for you to start your own free 14-day trial so please make sure to check them out thank you all so much and now back to the video now as far as everything you're about to see me doing which will be tinning the wires adding solder to the pads connecting the wires to the pads and combining LED strips together I do go over in great detail with very close-up footage in a video I made previously about soldering for beginners so if you're curious to learn more about this process at a much slower Pace with me providing commentary I highly recommend checking out that tutorial I've already put together and just so you know where I'm at in the process right here I'm attaching my three eight foot long wires to what will be the beginning of the LED strip and for this step I'll be connecting the end of the first strip to the beginning of the second and then doing the same for the third section [Music] and finally I'm not sure at this point if I'll be using these or not but just in case I'll be connecting some power injection wires to the very end of the LED strip now for this I don't need to worry about the data line so all I need is two wires and again I'll be cutting each section to about eight feet in length so these wires are now getting attached to the end of the strip one will go on the voltage pad and the other to the ground with nothing being connected to the middle data one thing to Quick point out is that you can use any color wires that you want but with me using all white ones I'll generally just use a red and black marker to indicate what is my voltage and ground to make it easier on me when getting things set up now it's time to start putting up the aluminum channels for this you could use the included clips that it comes with but I've recently been using 3M sticky pads which has worked out great since they won't damage your walls if you ever need to take things down next I'll be installing the long LED strip that we put together earlier on in the video I'm starting at the end right here and I'll be working my way around towards the beginning that means the LED strip that I'm attaching in this corner right now is the part that only has the two power injection wires as I got to the end I do have some leftover LED strips so I'm going to go ahead and add a couple more diffuser channels to the wall so we can use up the entire length once the strip is installed I can now move on to attaching the long diffuser cover and when I did need to make a cut at the end in Corners some scissors were all I needed [Music] so to better hide the eight foot long wires coming down from the strips I'm going to be using some cable concealer with some painters tape to secure to the wall now I'm going to be doing a dedicated video soon going over how to run wires through the wall for a more clean install but if you don't want to go through that extra work this is about as good as it's going to get and in most cases good enough for me moving on to controlling and power I'll be using this esp32 that already has W LED installed and if you're curious on how to do that I made a full walkthrough video of that process you can check out if interested I'll also be using some 20 gauge breadboard jumper cables a couple three piece wiggle Clips a couple two piece connectors where either style will work a small resistor and a 5 volt 20 amp power supply to get things set up I'm first going to attach a new wire to one of the negative terminals on the supply as well as another to one of the positive posts then take a three slot wiggle connector and attach one to the red positive wire and another to the black negative next I'll be connecting the three breadboard jumper wires to the esp32 the red will go to the voltage pin the white to the ground and the green to the D2 data post foreign at this point I'm going to take the three long eight foot wires that are connected to the beginning of my LED strip find the one that has the red marking which I know is connected to the voltage pad of the strip and insert into the Wago that's connected to the positive terminal to supply then I'll find the wire with the black marking that's connected to the ground pad or the LED strip and put in the connector that goes to the negative post on the power supply then I'll be taking the esp32 and inserting the red voltage breadboard wire that's connected to the VIN pin on the module to the last opening of the Wago that goes to our positive terminal I'll be doing the exact same thing with the white jumper wire that's connected to the gnd pin of the esp32 to the last open slot of the Wego that goes to the negative post on our supply now as for the data since the wire going from our controller to the first led is relatively long at eight feet if we just connected it directly the data signal wouldn't be strong enough to travel the distance and our LED strip would do all sorts of crazy things but I found that all you have to do is add a tiny little resistor like this to the setup and you should be good to go I haven't tested this out on crazy long distances but I know it at least works for up to 10 feet since that's the most I've ever had a need to try it on thank you and as far as hiding the power supply and controller I'll probably just end up doing something similar to what I did in this video that I already put together so feel free to check that out if you're interested so this brings me to what I feel might be the biggest misunderstanding when it comes to powering LEDs now if you wanted to use these type of pixels as your primary light source then that would certainly be a use case for potentially trying to Max things out but for pretty much everything I do with LEDs and what I assume many of you are looking to do is just to create a cool looking space and for that you probably don't need nearly as much power as you might think to achieve the type of results you're looking for and as I'm going into my settings you can see that I have my brightness limiter set to 3000 milliamps which is only 3 volts this is enough to power the entire strip of close to 900 LEDs at what I would consider a perfect amount of brightness to provide some incredible ambient lighting it's also important to mention that I've yet to even touch the injection wires at the end and this is all running only off the power hooked up at the beginning of the strip so I'll leave a lot more footage of this in action at the end but I did want to move on to a couple additional things that I feel might be helpful to touch on so hypothetically I could very easily extend the two power injection wires that I soldered to the end of the strip and run them all the way back to this power source to provide an extra boost and this would especially be ideal if you did end up putting the lights around your entire room since the beginning and the end would be in the same spot but if the beginning and the end were somewhat far away like they are on my setup right now it might make more sense to use a separate power source to provide a boost at the end so you don't have to run the really long wires back to the beginning now if you did want to do it that way with a separate power supply there is one thing you're going to want to do since the voltage from different power units should never cross what I recommend doing before you install the LED strips on the wall is to cut them at about the halfway mark you can cut it wherever but if you're able to do it at a spot where there's already a solder joint this will make it a little bit easier once you have the two pieces I think it's easiest just to cut off one of the 5 volt copper pads then you can reattach the two strips together by re-soldering the ground and data after that you're good to go ahead and connect the two power inject action wires at the end to a completely different 5 volt power supply than the beginning but since the data and ground are still connected all the animations will continue to flow perfectly throughout now in this video I'm using the sk6812 LEDs that have 60 LEDs per meter these diffuser channels do a great job at diffusing the light but as you can see here on the bottom it's not quite what I've considered to be perfectly diffused when compared to the Top Channel which has a strip with 100 LEDs per meter but for longer installs being that this has a continuous diffuser cover it is a great option to have available and the last thing I want to mention is that domestic automation now has some boards built specifically for the sk6812 pixels that I'm using for this install so if you're wanting to simplify the setup process to a plug and play solution I'll leave a link to that product as well as everything else I've mentioned in the video in the description so that about wraps things up for this walkthrough I'll leave you with some more footage of the esp32 setup from earlier using the same 3000 milliamp brightness limiter setting with no power injection hooked up thank you all so much for watching and as always I hope you have a blessed day [Music] all right [Music] [Applause] [Music] thank you [Music] thank you [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: Chris Maher

Views: 464,764

Keywords: computer, pc, custom, tech, technology, iphone, setup, tour, review, rgb, rgb led, led string, leds, rgb leds, ceiling, wall, room, ceiling leds, ceiling led, rgb strip, rgb led strip, ceiling rgb led strip, 33ft led strip, plug, whole room, install, diy, power injection, led strip install, long led strip install, how to power inject led strips, install leds in entire room, led strip, wled esp8266, wled to esp32, voltage drop, led voltage drop, esp32 led strip control, smart home

Id: SpD_fhfP5ys

Length: 11min 54sec (714 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 08 2023