Answers to the Most Common DIY LED Questions

how's it going as you probably know I do a lot of live streams and I totally understand that not everybody has two hours to sit down and watch a whole live stream but in those live streams there's a lot of good information this video is a condensed version of the last live stream where I put together what I thought with most important points in a much more manageable amount of time ready here we go big thanks to PCB way for sponsoring this video a lot of my favorite projects use custom PCBs like the VH onofre all of the Quinn led boards and the H a switchblade ordering from PCB way is pretty easy and they're always running some kind of special so you'd be pretty sure that you're getting a good deal they deliver fast but most importantly it's good quality stuff so if you've got a project that needs custom PCBs check out PCB weight one of the questions that I get a lot a lot a lot a lot is how many LEDs can I run from one node MCU the answer is I don't know the answer from err cookie his recommendation was like 500 I think he said 5 or 600 I wanted to kind of show what happens and or if anything bad would happen and I don't think anything bad is gonna happen what we're gonna do is run 750 LEDs and see what happens so this is 750 and there's no problems right now there's nothing wrong everything's working fine we can scroll through some of the effects dynamic doesn't really move very much it moves a little bit we could make it move more here's running okay so it's it's handling 750 fine so far this gonna strobe ah sorry oh there goes colourful that is pretty that's just pretty red and blue these LEDs look so good so so far so good not having any troubles at all it's running seven or 50 fine now I actually have here one more thing we can attach I've got here also on matrix that has another 250 so should we plug that in and see if we can get that to run as well there we go there's the matrix as well so now we've got over a thousand LEDs let's go back to the effects and we'll do some stuff are they connected in series or parallel they're connected in series for data they're connected in parallel for power Wow current estimated usage is unknown I guess it runs out of bounds there Oh down here current estimated usage unknown oh I think maybe it's because of this there it goes so when it's set to 65,000 I think he just picked that number as a number that probably nobody would ever want to go over and maybe when you do that it stops estimating I wonder if it changes by the effect colorful with the high saturation now let's look at the estimated current again see if it changed this whole desk is getting warm so yeah there you go it does change that's awesome so this current estimated usage changes based on the effect that you're running got a fire extinguisher nearby yeah I'd actually do out that's hot we're gonna turn this down a second hold on hold on back to the initial experiment though for a second having a thousand LEDs on one node MCU seemed to work fine there's probably some point where it's gonna fail some of the faster effects may not look right the FPS drops that's probably true note MCU plus 750 LEDs were drawing 0.6 amps so what happens if I turn on 750 LEDs running color winkle look at that already whoo maybe what we'll do since this is already at four-and-a-half amps and this is not a very intense effect let's cut down the LEDs do some experimenting here with our 150 LEDs we're gonna do some different effects dynamic let's put the brightness all the way up to point seven let's see if we can get it up higher with any of these effects colorful four point four four point four divided by hundred fifty what's that so we're at 30 milliamps let's get to business here let's go solid different colors are gonna have different current draws there's green there's sort of a light blue 3.6 amps straight blue four and a half four pink red is lower 2.8 orange is gonna be up there again a little as we go up in shades here of yellow towards white now let's do it here we go maxing out full white full brightness 150 LEDs 5.2 six amps somebody do that math 35 the next very common question that I've had LEDs is can you show the 12 volt wiring again like how do you do the 12 the wiring when you have 12 volt LEDs this is 12 volt power I've got it hooked up to a 12 volt 2 amp power supply that I'm going to plug that in to the input side of the DC DC converter when you're running 12 o LEDs you need one of these of some kind or another you can use this kind there's a whole bunch of different kinds some of them are cheaper some of them are more expensive I think from Aliexpress this one is about $2 if I remember right step 1 connect 12 volts to the input side of your DC DC converter the other thing to do is I'm connecting wires to the output side so 12 volts goes in 5 volts comes out so these two here are gonna go to the power of my node MCU so I'm gonna power this like that so now I've got the 5 volt output positive and negative going to V in and ground on my node MCU okay so 12 volts comes in 5 volts goes out to power my LEDs they usually give you these extra connectors I'm gonna use one of those on the 12-volt side so see those are connected to 12 volts I've got the ground on the ground and the red positive 12 volts on the positive and that's what's going to connect to my LEDs this is the data so this is gonna connect to d4 over here connected now I just need some LEDs 12 volt LEDs I'm just gonna connect this to here I don't right now I don't need these extra 2 wires I could use those to connect here but it doesn't matter as long as I've got 12 volts and ground going to the LEDs and 5 volts going to the node MCU now some people have had troubles if the ground that is going to your controller is not shared with the ground that is going to your LEDs you will have troubles power supply led and controller grounds all have to be together I think people have had trouble with that so just explaining one more time now the way I've got it connected because inside here these grounds are shared so effectively that's what I've got if your grounds are not shared if something's not working just try making try connecting this to the ground there and that should be equal so there you go they're working right work in work in work in now I want to try something else I'm actually going to take this ground wire off of here and I'm gonna put it on the 12-volt side shouldn't make a difference should work either way all right turn back on there you go samesies the grounds have to be all common they have to be all connected together and that's what they are right now they are all on one screw terminal ground from the LEDs ground from the controller and ground from the power supply are all connected to the same screw that's important was that helpful so another thing that a lot of people asked is about letting the data they say how many how many strings can I run off of one node MCU if you're using something like ESP home Ortez mota I think you can do more than one pin but the way w LED is written as of right now you can only use one pin that means this controller will send one signal out to say LEDs do this and it's and it's a linear signal it's one line it's gonna go in order LED number one you do this LED number two you do this LED number three you do that okay and it goes down to however many LEDs you tell it and it just runs that effect that's it you so you can't say I want a different LED number one to do a different effect you can split that signal and run that same signal to two strips but those two strips will do the exact same thing there will be they will run the identical effect all the way down the line and you can in fact you could do that probably I don't even know how many times you maybe we can experiment with that I've got six strings LEDs here let's do that I think for practical purposes for most of us that are actually putting things on our house we're not designing like making a matrix on the side of a skyscraper or something you're not gonna run into a limit of splits and as I showed at the beginning here if you run a thousand LEDs in a row you just make sure you've got the right power connections so that you don't end up melting a small small wire along the way because you very possibly could dun-dun-dun-dun this wires getting frayed haha I've twisted this wire together so many times it just feels all frayed and thin like butter scraped over too much bread this is five strings of LEDs I've got one data line coming from d4 and it's going to five different other jumper wires so basically I've just split what's coming from d4 five times and I'm sending each signal to each LED strip so as far as the controller knows what we should do here is change this 250 okay that's good so my LED strip is set to 150 that's correct this was set to 150 and I had these LEDs hooked up in series and I had 750 in series only the first hundred 50 would light up this is going to show that this these are actually all doing the same effect turn them on and they're all doing color winkle so now we need to do an effect where it's like a run or something that is flowing this do light house so now you get a better idea that they're all doing the same thing right so as far as the controller is concerned the controller thinks there are there's one strip of 150 LEDs I just split that signal that it's sending five times when somebody says how many LEDs can you run off of one node MCU well there's no limit to how many times you can split it we kind of been talking about that but it's they're all gonna do the same thing there's only one pin can send one signal you can split that signal but one pin can just run one signal okay that was a long time getting around to that point hope it was worth it so for those of you just tuning in we've got note MCU hooked up to a very very long wire here it's probably 20 feet or something and that's what's running our data so the data line goes from here into the LEDs and it's a really really long data line so that voltage is gonna be really low and look at my effect you see that it looks like garbage that's not what it's supposed to look like let's go back here let's run through some experiments let's just go to solid it's supposed to be solid alright I hit solid I didn't hit blink or flicker or anything it's supposed to be solid and it's not even capable of doing solid and look at that flickering when you change effects it flickers like that okay so this length is definitely too long I'm gonna try it at 4 feet now or there abouts much shorter same problem yeah still doing the same thing this is half the length that it was before so 4 feets too much now using thin wires is probably a little worse right because I mean if I use these thin little jumper wires that's gonna be worse because that'll be even more resistant so the voltage will drop even more so now we've got one two three four jumper wires no still let's just shorten this let's take one of these out okay there we go okay so now it seems to be working so I have found a length that is okay it's hard to see what I've actually done here but trust me I have one single and this is actually a WS 2018 pixel five volts and it's got its input data coming from the node MCU and it's right next to the node MCU and then on the output side that's this other green wire is what is going to this long wire which goes way over here and around around around and plugs into the data on this strip of LEDs over here in contrast to what we saw when we had this same wire hooked up directly from the node MCU to the first LED with at a distance of several feet in contrast to that when we turn it on now with this sacrificial pixel in place which is just acting as a voltage booster what we get now is exactly what we expect from our lights we get all the colors they actually work really well I'm gonna go to LED preferences and I'm gonna say skip the first LED it's right in my ear skip the first LED save and reboot reboot required reboot required yep now my first LED is not turning on yay first time every time so there you go so if you need to jump a gap if you want to put your controller somewhere and then put your actual LED strips somewhere farther away you can sacrifice a pixel to do that so right now what we've got is just one pixel but it doesn't matter if this was already a line of 500 pixels we could still jump the gap from pixel number 500 to pixel number 501 could be really long now let's see how far we can get we've got our sacrificial Pixel coming out of our sacrificial Pixel running ten meters of 22 gauge wire and then into our LED strip again so now we're gonna see if turning on our LED strip gives us flickering or not it does not it looks perfect so there you go with a sacrificial pixel you can easily go ten meters so let's try twenty can I get some boats who thinks is gonna work raise your hand it'll work or explode oh my gosh it's beautiful it's beautiful twenty meters using this kind of a pixel is nice because you it's wired I've done this and actually this isn't bad you put a little dab of solder on these things and you use these connectors from that you get extras when you buy your d1 mini since and different things with these kinds of the WS twenty at eleven strings that have these bulbs and stuff they have wires so it's easy to enough to just you know twist a couple wires together and there you go so we dumped straight forty so you just go straight to forty meters 40 meters no problem so what we need is more wire I've got wire all right we have a hundred and ninety two meters of wire between our sacrificial pixel and our string of LEDs there is no way this is gonna work no wait yeah there goes okay 192 meters is too much it doesn't like 152 metres 80 meters Ready Set fire ah ha ha that didn't work here we are 60 meters ready set no good was 60 oh yeah it's like on the verge it's like it wants to be ok but it's not quite okay 50 I know what you're saying we could have figured this out if we would have just gone from 40 to 50 instead of 40 to 192 and back 50 meters just up with that that reaction that we just got honestly made me feel like there was like a loose strand somewhere doing something funny now 40 works there's one little flicker well let's see those little flickers if you do get a little flicker like that just try connections well that was fun 40 is no problem if you need to go any further than that then then rearrange your display somehow well that's it for this livestream rewind hope that was helpful to you as always thanks for watching till next time adios [Music] if you need help or want to chat with me or others who also enjoy projects like this you can find us on Facebook and discord if you like what I'm doing and you want to support me you can use my special product links in the video description or head over to patreon or just like and share my videos that's 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Channel: DrZzs

Views: 55,255

Keywords: Home Automation, Home Assistant, Sonoff, DIY, Electronics, Tasmota, Arduino, 3d printing, smart home, hassio, esp8266, sonoff basic, iot, nodemcu, drzzs, wemos d1, esphome, home automation, automation, tech, drzzzs, dr zzs, dr zzzs, hassos, home assistant, home assistant automation, iot home automation, tasmota, drzzs sonoff, tech hacks, technical hacks, esp32, iot automation

Id: ZFO_QOBG9Bs

Length: 18min 3sec (1083 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 07 2019