Calculate LED Strip Voltage Drop With 💡QuinLED💡: You'll Be Surprised How Many Wires You Need!

hey guys welcome to a new video I recently did a video on LED strip power injection and I've done one way in the past like one or two years ago and I've always linked those on my website but I realized there's a lot of interest in those streams but I never did a real video about it so maybe a lot of people are missing them so that's what this video will be we'll sit down and we'll calculate power injection or basically how to wire up your addressable LED strip and we're going to learn everything today so total amount of power you need so you can size your power supply the amount of injection points you're going to need so that you can run your LED strip correctly and you're not dealing with voltage drop the amount of power each injection point is going to use and then what wire diameter you need to go to that injection Point combined with the amount of power we then know it's going to draw and the distance from your power supply or queen LED board I think that's going to be very interesting we'll be looking at three different scenarios 5 volt 12 volt and 24 volt and I'll type those out in a notepad and you can follow along basically I do advise you to watch all of them because I'll be giving explanations as to why or how we're calculating certain things and I might not do those as extensively in all the examples but I will try and have jump links in the description [Music] foreign [Music] well let's first go through some Theory and to do that we're going to go to a web browser in this case we're going to go to Queen led.info and there all the Articles I'm going to talk about are in the digitally addressable LEDs section so we can click on there here you can see all the controllers we can use also give some controller advice based on my own controllers I have four digitally addressable LED controllers nowadays the dig to go which is a small USBC powered for 5 volt 3 amps then we have the Dig Uno that can do 5 to 24 volt up to 10 to 15 amps I'd advice so the quad can do up to 30 amps and has onboard power distribution and fusing and has four output channels and then the OCTA system can do 50 to 100 amps and has 8 channels and all kinds of upgrades so I'll talk about that slightly during all the calculations and things like that but what we're most interested in is some articles for instance here in the power related sections we have the digitally address or the digital LED power usage sheet and here we have a sheet for 5 volt a sheet for 12 volt and a sheet for 24 volt and these are real world measurements so for instance if we look in the 5 volt sheet and we zoom in a bit let's see here first up we have ws2812b the generic strip we all use and we can see that if we're running 100 red we're drawing 25 watts all these sheets are in Watts so that way you can compare 5 volt 12 volt or 24 volt since watts are always the same also these sheets are based off 60 LEDs a meter generally or it will be noted and 300 LEDs so a 5 meter or 16 foot strip but the main value we're going to use during calculations is going to be RGB white 50 percent why is that you ask well if you look at this sheet and you start comparing all kinds of values you see in the in the more real world scenarios if you look at police all 100 or loading orange 100 or rainbow 100 percent Lucy 25 watts 11 watts and 25 watts again if we look at the RGB white 50 value we see that that's 33 Watts so that's slightly higher than any effect that I tested used also single colors only use 25 watts so again the 50 white value is slightly higher than any single color now dual color will come near the 50 whites are generally like 35 maybe 40 Watts but I think the RGB white 50 value is good to calculate with as a nominal value basically I don't advise anyone to run RGB white at 100 because RGB white looks horrible it's it's basically a white colored light but it's not white spectrum light and I'll have a article linked down below about the CRI of light but basically addressable LEDs cannot be used as primary lighting RGB W is slightly better we also have some SK 6812 here which is rgbw but still it's CRI so the quality of the white light is quite low um but yeah we're going to be using the RGB white 50 value and we can use the power limiter in W led to make sure it never exceeds that and that way we can adjust our fusing for that so that if it did ever exceed that our fuses would pop and we'll always be safe by a hardware protection and software wise we can limit power so that it never exceeds well basically the scenarios we calculated for so that it always will look good um I hope that makes sense uh it is kind of a quick explanation basically calculating everything for 100 White you're over specing everything twice twice fold for only one scenario you'll never use or shouldn't use anyway and that's why we're going to use RGB white 50 as the values because that means we use less power thinner cables etc etc okay I hope that makes sense a second thing uh we're going to State upfront is that we know how much an injection Point can use at maximum the reason for that is there's a whole live stream you can see here but I have another article the the how much can a single injection Point handle article and this this basically goes into some tests I did where I tested with the default black jst plug we have an older LED strips or I snip those off and wired the wires directly or I use the jst plug plus the extra wires or even I desoldered everything and I soldered on 16 gauge wire quite thick 1.3 millimeter square and as you can see here basically we could never get more than four amps and maybe a little bit into the strip effectively the harder we would push it the more voltage drop we would get so for an edge injection so if you have a strip that means here on the side at the start or at the end we can only inject about four apps okay that's a rule we're going to use second if we have a middle injection basically if you have a middle you have copper going this way and copper going this way that means we have twice as much copper near there so we're going to state that a middle injection can handle a maximum of 8 amps okay if you want to see those tests and you don't believe it and you you're running your 60 amp power supply with a single injection and it's working fine that's great but physics still exists and basically the copper layer on the Strip is only well it's quite thin so it's only so much and that amount of copper can only carry so much current before well basically the voltage which will start dropping and it becomes less or even useless to run more power so that's why you have to run extra wires next to your LED strip adding copper and then injecting that in a later point because you then you basically circumvent the resistance that copper builds up for more than four amps and you're injecting it later in a path that doesn't have that resistance so then well you have more power that can make it into the strip and as I I just mentioned if you want to do that for RGB white 100 and if you have a five meter five volt strip of 60 LEDs a meter you will have to inject front middle and end to do that perfectly then you'll have a perfectly balanced strip in regards to voltage drop and power injection and things like that but as I already mentioned I kind of find that to be Overkill so what I would do is inject the front and the end that will give us eight amps that can make it into the strip because the front injection can do four amps and the end injection can do four amps an alternative method that you can use is injecting the middle of the strip because that will also give us eight apps and well if we quickly check back in the 5 volt sheet let me zoom in there a little bit if we have eight amps and it's 5 volt and I'm going to go to my notepad scene here I'm going to do all calculations using the calculator if we have 5 volt times 8 amps that means we have 40 Watts available okay looking in our sheet and these led strips have all been tested by me in an ideal condition so if many injection points Etc so this is the the most they can possibly use without suffering from any voltage drop we see that RGB white is 33 watt or a single color is 25 watt or the the effect that used the most uses 25 watt again so if we have eight apps we can effectively inject into our strip either front end or middle that's enough for running effects and single colors and things like that not for RGB White but anything else than that it is so I hope that kind of explains the rules we're going to use to calculate these things now let's define some scenarios shall we scenario one and I'll probably be silent doing most typing parts so I can speed those up in post but yeah so let me quickly design specify a few scenarios and then we'll walk through each of the steps how to calculate things one moment okay so we have three scenarios we're going to do 20 meter each time you'll learn if you follow along how to do it for 15 35 whatever meters 20 meter is 64 feet I guess I should mention that I can't guarantee I'll I'll work with American lengths always I do like using wire gauges but I'll put a link on the description and um uh in the video description uh where to use where to find the voltage drop calculator we're going to use in this video I'll also make this notepad available for download on my website so I guess I should also put the put the link here okay we're going to be using that voltage stop calculator that reminds me of another rule uh basically let me write down the rules so we're going to be using all power values from the powersheet we're going to calculate with the nominal power value that's always enough for effects and single colors do colors Etc so that's RGB white 50 percent we're going engine injections can do about four amps middle injections can do about eight amps and a power injection wire should never have or not have more than 10 percent voltage drop on that wire and we're going to use this calculator voltage drop calculator to calculate that so scenarios 20 meters each time 5 volt 12 volt 24 volt ws2812b and the strip and type of LED we all love and use ws2815 which has some interesting caveats and then ws2811 which is 720 LEDs per meter but it's Cobb LED strip so it's actually tuned at 40 LEDs a meter if you count RGB like on the other strips but I have a whole dedicated video about that and I really love this addressable neon strip so you should really check that video out anyway let's go to scenario one so we know that 5 meters or 16 feet let's quickly check that and it's over here so we're back in our powersheet ws2812b uh five meters or 300 LEDs use let's say 35 Watts right let's round it up a little bit so 20 meters or 64 feet num needs users so we go to our calculator that is 35 times 4. 140 Watts up to 5 volts nope I didn't sorry I was on the wrong screen let's go through that quickly scenario one five meters uses 35 watt that we got from our sheet and then 20 meters uses 140 Watts that's basically 5 times 35 at 5 volt okay so we know we have 20 meters and we also know that we need to do 140 watt but we only know how many amps an injection Point can take so let's see 140 watt divided by 5 volt that is 28 amps in total so now we need to divide those amps over the injection points we need but we don't know how many injection points we need but we do know how we can structure it um with the 4 and the eight amp values so let's see how our strips is constructed we have a front and then we have middle then we have script in the middle another step and again point right let me have anything here so if we inject power at the front uh let's do it here and then no no let's not do that that's not okay sorry I I I'm figuring this out with you guys if we inject power in the middle here and then we inject power in the middle here and then we inject power in the middle here that means we have three middle injection points that means we can do three times eight apps three times eight amps is 24 amps and we need um 28 amps now generally I'd say that's close enough but we can say okay okay let's let's do a injection at the front two and um well this kind of changes things because now the first strip will be receiving power from the front or let's say here from the front but also from the middle so it'll start to take less from the Middle Point probably but let's let's ignore that right now let's say front is uh four amps middle is eight amps because that's our first mineral first middle second middle is also eight out and the third middle is also eight amps right now this generally is probably uh maybe it'll take a little bit less from the front um would it yeah no no it's four amps on both sides that actually makes sense no this works so this is four plus eight plus eight plus eight is uh Jesus I was going to calculate everything right calculate calculate say plus eight no I didn't do that right eight plus eight plus eight plus four 28 amps so that matches the calculated value that we need nominally to satisfy the current requirements of the strip strip we have to run 20 meters of ws2812b okay I hope that makes sense we're doing a lot of middle injections once we raise voltage so we go to 12 volt or 24 volt strip we can do more with just front and back or front middle and back or something like that but as it is right now with four strips we can do three middle injections and that kind of works out best okay um so the second so now we know total amount of nominal power how many injection points we need to satisfy that power demand because well with our rules we just have to make more power injections until we satisfy those rules right and um now that we know how much power each point is going to use we also kind of already know how far each point is going to be because if we take this over here and okay let's say the front is one meter away that means our first middle injection is six meters away because it's a five meter strip that means this one is 11 meters away and this one is 16 meters away right so using all those values there we can go to our voltage drop calculator and see what that comes up to so let's go to our browser voltage drop calculator and we're going to leave it at 18 gauge for now I like calculating cables in gauge but there is a very very simple AWD to millimeter square converter if you need one so let's put it to meters one meter let's set it to volts 5 volts and we want to be able to deliver four amps calculate okay so let's say we go we'll make it use a thinner cable I wouldn't go below 20 gauge so let's say that 20 gauge is fine to do our front injection right so here we need 20 gauge the first middle injection needs 8 amps and it's six meters away okay let's go back to our browser we need eight amps and it's six meters away now we see we're dropping 3.1 Volt or 3.18 over 5 volts so that's 63 percent that's not going to work so let's go to 16 gauge nope 14 gauge almost there which is a 12 gauge yes 12 gauge puts us below 10 drop on our injection wire which is what we said we would need because the problem with 5 volt LEDs is basically if you compare this with Pue or other standards those are all devices where you have an input voltage and the output voltage is converted again at the end so for instance with Pue you input 48 volt and at the end 35 volts arrives that's not a problem with Peewee because then the end device converts that 35 38 40 42 volts whatever is coming in down to for instance 12 volt which needs itself like an IP camera or something like that so it always down converts with LEDs for power injection like this we have a device that needs 5 volt so if 3 volt comes in yeah that's not going to do much we need 5 volt we're not down converting at the end anymore and that's why we need to size up these cables so much because we can't really afford much voltage drops if we input 5 volt we need 5 volt to arrive at the end now we need to have some margin here so I have a 10 rule that means at 5 volt we can drop 0.5 volt so four and a half volt and we're still okay that's also within specifications of the LEDs and things like that right so looking at our scene here we see that we need a 12 gauge cable which that's already quite a big boy so that is 12 gauge now the second middle injection is 11 meters away and also 8 amps so we go back to our scene here and we say 11 and well we can now see we're getting 18 drop on that cable that's too much so we need to step that down um let's go for close enough 11.5 percent 0.57 drop volt drop okay so let's put in uh that we need 10 gauge for this one but then it gets worse now we need 16 meters and we still need uh eight amps so 16 meters yeah that's not good enough okay with eight gauge put eight gauge is huge but we need eight gauge cable to basically satisfy the nominal need of our LED strip that also explained one second one second oh okay so this is 20 gauge cable It's relatively thin but there's still some copper in there for us European folks this is 0.5 millimeter square it's a decent cable right and well this is Affordable it's you know it's okay this is eight gauge cable is that is a lot thicker I mean it it's it's not well it's not as thick as my my pinky but it's quite a hefty cable and let me calculate that for you because I don't know from head that is 8.3 millimeter square cable that's huge and even if that by itself wouldn't be a problem um it's hella expensive so and I mean it's not you can't screw that into a terminal of a queen of any of the queen LED boards because it's just an insane diameter cable to get the little voltage drop we need to survive 16 meters for eight amps that we need to run that LED strip and this also kind of explains why if you look around and if people do the actual math they'll tell you anything beyond 10 meters for 5 volt strip it's just not feasible because you run into issues needing cables such as this to even run it nominally we're not talking 100 here we're running nominal values here so single colors and effects so yeah there are other methods you can do that you for instance using Buck converter so you can run 24 volt on the power distribution and then down convert it to 5 volt at the end but we're not going to talk about that in this video I do have an article I'll have that Linked In the description which goes to everything like that and I might do a dedicated video about that in the future and well yeah I hope that kind of explains why 5 volt LED strips is awesome it's the cheapest out there but it's not usable for long length scenarios because well you run into these problems those are those are giant cables but that does conclude this scenario I think we know the total amount of power we need so 140 Watts as I mentioned in the beginning what kind of power supply do you then need well let's add that power supply plus 20 percent so that is 140 times 1.2 that is 168 Watt 68 watt so probably get like a 200 watt power supply then you have more than enough margin and you'll always have enough power at hand okay and this also explains fusing fusing I'm a very big advocate of having fuses in your LED setup so each injection line should have its own fuse why a 4 amp line that's basically never going to do more than 4 amp as I showed you in the beginning on my website with my tests should get a 5 amp fuse doesn't matter what wire diameter is behind there I mean even if it's this wire which can easily handle 40 amps um we don't expect more than 4 amps so we fuse at four amps because if we do draw more something's wrong and the same goes for a middle injection in-app should get a 10 AM fuse same deal if we expect 8 amps and it's basically never going to draw more a 10 amp fuse should do nicely no matter what cable size is in between there unless we're talking a really thin cable because then of course that doesn't apply because then the cable needs to be able to carry at least 10 amps but in our cases all of them can so that's not a problem so we know total power we know total amps we know uh the expected power we need for all the injection points and we calculated all the injection points we need and we know our fuses that we need we have the links because those are just the links of the LED strip and then we also know the cable diameters we're going to need to be able to basically provide that LED strip with the current it needs I hope that makes sense so let's go to scenario two scenario two scenario two we set we're going to use 12 volt LED strip but in this case we're going to use a special variant now why am I saying a special variant that's because ws2815 is basically the only single addressable LED uh 12 volt strip out there so most strips like 20ish ws2811 or SK 6812 or ws2814 or Etc are per 3 addressable if they're running in 12 with 12 volt the reason for that is the LED diodes themselves are basically three or four or five volts basically so having 5 volt we can run them at their native voltage but if we have 12 volt coming in it can't handle that so we need to drop down the voltage amount now most strips do this by dividing the power over three LEDs that way you can drop down the voltage in series over those three LEDs and you get down to a voltage that the LED can use the downside however is that those three LEDs always need to do the exact same thing to always have that voltage drop if one of them would be doing something else at that moment while the voltage drop wouldn't apply and you'd blow up the LED basically so that's why 12 volt LED strips are generally per three LED adjustable and 24 volt LED strips are generally per six LEDs adjustable now as I mentioned ws2815 is an exception it is single addressable while being 12 volt how did it do that you ask well let's go back to our browser and back to the powersheet and we're going to back out and we're going to go to the 12 volt sheet and if we look in here we have ws2811 that is a version that is it says it here in the table per 3 addressable and we have ws2815 which is single addressable both are 300 LEDs but um well I can't really see it here I I named this addressable zones ws2815 has 300 adjustable zones because it has 300 individually addressable LEDs but ws2811 has 100 addressable zones even though it has 300 LEDs because they are per 3 and decibel hope that makes sense now if we look here we can see something interesting RGB white 100 uses about 50 Watts 48.6 but 100 red also uses about 50 watt and 100 green also uses 50 watt and 100 blue also uses 50 Watts what's going on here okay let's look at that ws2811 which is per 3 addressable here we see it only uses 30 watt 30 watt 30 watt while white uses 75 watt that's the reason um well that's the difference by staying single addressable they have to find a different way of stepping down the voltage from 12 volt to 5 or 3 volt with the LED diode can use in ws2815 they basically integrated a blind diode I'll call it the internal structure is different with the current regulator and things like that but basically you should assume that it has two blind diodes in there if you're only using 100 red the red diode will light up and two blind diodes will light up and will basically burn the power off that it needs to drop down over three LEDs or over three diodes to make the voltage usable so if you're using 100 RGB white well it'll have three visible diodes adrenium blue and if you're using only red it'll have one visible diode and two non-visible diodes now this isn't a correctly technical explanation because it works differently in the current chips but it's a logical explanation I think you can understand if we then look at ws2811 this one we see that it works normally like a 5 volt strip would because dropping the voltage over three LEDs is basically 99 efficient versus what ws2815 is doing which is very inefficient so for instance if you're doing a battery powered project I'd much more recommend ws2811 than ws2815 or maybe I'd recommend going with 5 volt because those are always more efficient because ws2815 is going to draw more power we can even compare that if we say Okay 100 red uses 51 Watts we then go back and enter into a 5 volt sheet and we zoom in here we see that 100 red uses 25 watts that means well it can mean two things ws2812 12b is double as efficient or ws2815 is 50 as efficient basically the last thing but okay it doesn't matter anyway it is still a popular variant because most people don't really care and if you look at effects uh it depends on how many LEDs are lit at the same time at which brightness so here police all uses the maximum power 50 watt but for instance orange 100 not all LEDs on the Strip are lit and if if it's completely not lit it doesn't use any power except for the standby power and then we see around 18 Watts or rainbow 100 uses about 40 Watts but you can go to these sheets yourself and compare what would be best for your project for instance ws2011 in this scenario we use about 30 Watts or 25 watts or 30 Watts again so in some scenarios it uses more some scenarios it uses less yeah so I hope that makes sense anyway I got kind of sidetracked here scenario two um we're going to be using 20 meters again so 5 meters 16 feet uses 50 watt we just looked up in the power sheet so oh that's another reason um I kind of glanced over my conclusion there this is the reason why we're going to use 100 white power or red or green or blue for ws2815 well if we'd be calculating ws2811 we would be able to be able to use the 50 RGB white value that's the reason that you know the difference between having it dropped over three LEDs so visually it's less appealing but it is more power efficient so you can use the same method as we used for five volt LEDs but for ws2815 we need to use the 100 value okay so 5 meters uses 50 watt well that makes my life easy that means that 20 meters uses 200 watt 200 watt divided by 12 volt is 11 16 0.66 amps which is still lower in regards to amps versus the 28 amps we had for a 5 volt strip so even though it's less efficient we are using less amps and since all cables and other things are calculated in amps not in Watts that will make her life easier okay so let's see the next thing we did we calculated the injection points now we have the same buildup of the strip because it's again four or five meter strips so let's let's remove these real quick we need to inject 16 amps into the strip or 16.66 let's say we're wrapping this strip around our room so we can easily make a front injection we can easily make an End injection and well we still need more amps because front is four and this four so let's inject here in the middle right so we have front is four amps to Middle is eight amps and is 4X total is well I don't need the calculator for that 16 apps and we just said we needed 16 amps well that's easy um I'm gonna go back up a little bit uh recommended power supply is over let's calculate that real quick 200 times 1.2 well let's say 250 watt Plus okay so now we have our front uh our middle and our end which is already enough we don't need front middle middle or middle middle whatever we only need three injections and if this is wrapping around our room our front and our end injection are quite near so that's easy those are will both be one meter let's say and the middle injection well that will still be 11 meters because it's past two strips now it'll depend on the actual layout Etc but we have strip one here strip two here and again strip one a three here and strip four here um you could say but hey you said that we could inject um maybe also in this middle yes and no so before I already kind of alluded to this but if we say a front is injecting four amps but this strip only needs four amps if we then provide front plus middle here it'll only draw two amps from this one and two amps from this one so this this middle won't be eight but six and this will be two and then we still won't get our total power figure another issue that creates if we inject here and at the end of the strip the length from over here to the end is pretty long and voltage job increases with distance so if we know the amount of amps we need it's best to space those out as evenly as possible and in this case that's front end and middle you could also do a middle and middle so uh let's let's okay let's do an alternative alternative option let's say front and end and whatever isn't going to work for you for some reason or you want to run less wires or you can put your power supply in the middle and your the quad controller for instance then you can say okay I can do middle injection here and I can do middle injection here and that would be a valid method of doing it because we can get eight amps into this middle that means four apps can go into this strip and four amps can go into this trip that's fine both strips would be satisfied then we have a middle here this strip could then get four amps and this trip could then get four amps and again we'd be satisfied middle one is eight amps middle two is eight amps let's control call this controller in the middle option right um one thing to note is that your data connection always has to go on the front and I'll I'll talk a little bit about another thing we're not going to talk about right now in this video and that is that at some point you'll have to add a data connection and actually in these two scenarios you already have to but I'll get back to that at the end of the video so we can do that quickly uh do I need multiple data connections so I'll I'll put that there now let's calculate both scenarios in regards to cable so we have a front middle end we said our front was one meter away and we said our end was also one meter away and this was in the middle of two strips so that's 11 meters away and let's look at the other scenario which is two middles there let's say it's uh six meters and six meters okay hope that makes sense let's copy the skin and now we're going to do Photoshop calculations just like we did before so we go to our browser we go to our voltage drop calculator and well let's start with 18 gauge and we only need one meter 12 volt 4 amps right that's a front injection okay let's start with 20 gauge yeah well I don't want to drop below 20 gauge because as I mentioned before you do want the cable to be able to handle the amperage more than the fuse you put before it so let's not drop below 20 gauges there so this can be 20 gauge and this can be 20 gauge because we're talking this wrap around room scenario where front and end basically meet near the controller and well we have a middle Let's uh let's calculate that that's going to be 11 meters at 8 amps yeah that's that's not gonna work 16 gauge nope 14 gauge 12 gauge oh okay let's well let's go with 12 sure um 12 gauge so that satisfies our needs now compared with the five volt scenario this is already a whole lot better because now we just need two 20 gauge cables and one 12 gauge cable and a d quad can handle that or the Dig OCTA system can also easily handle that I wouldn't advise a dig Uno for these 20 meter scenarios because you kind of need some power distribution and fusing and things like that so um yeah now you could say but while you change the scenario and before the end injection was 16 meters away okay let's let's take a look at that real quick um if our end would be 16 meters away we can say okay we need four and 16 meters uh can we do that with a 14 gauge yes can we do that with a 16 gauge no so 16 meters 12 volt 4 amps because it's an end injection so an edge injection in that sense we need uh 14 gauge that's still a whole lot better than that insane uh insane 8 gauge that we needed for a 5 volt system okay let's take a look at our alternative option where we don't do front middle end where we do first middle and um third middle I believe we said yeah yeah so we have strip first middle and then we have second middle and then we have third middle so well I could I still call it middle one and middle two but you know they're spaced up because that's important those will both be six meters because we'll have our controller here in the middle for whatever reason it all depends on the layout of what you're building where would be the best spot for the controller of course of course you're going to need a data wire that's going from here to there but with a dick quad or a dig OCTA system within their built-in level shifters and uh level shifters resistor switchers and things like that having a 10 or 11 meter data cable generally is no problem I would advise to run a data cable and a ground cable next to each other so a two wire cable and then flip that channel to 33r mode what the hell am I talking about I'll talk about that a little bit at the end of the videos okay so we need six meters of eight amps times two because we're splitting from The Middle outward okay so we need six meters eight amps calculate huh can we use 16 gauge yes even better so now we can say uh sixteen eight as well again a dick quad and a special dig OCTA would be easily able to handle that now as I mentioned you're going to need extra wire extra wire for data to begin 11 meters uh there you know close ground in this scenario where in the other scenario our controller is at the front so you just run the data wire there and you're done in this alternative option where the controller is in the middle the data still needs to go to the front so you need an extra wire for data uh to front um to you know bring the data there and it's actually a little bit more complex than that but again we'll look at that after we do our third scenario because our second scenario even with an alternative option is now finished here we run front middle end we calculated total wattage or nominal total nominal wattage but nominal in the case of ws2815 is the 100 value so we need 16.6 amps I recommend this kind of power supply you have a front wheel and end injection I didn't talk about fusing but basically fusing is the same so I'm just going to copy that uh sure and in in this scenario we need three cables twin of two of 20 gauge and one of 12 gauge if our if we loop around the wound for instance or front and end come back back together at the same place so basically you only have to run one thicker injection wire or alternatively we can do two middle injections and run a data plus ground wire for a data connection to the beginning of the strip and then we only need two 16 gauge cables so even though it's kind of the same scenario we have single addressable LEDs the only thing we change is going to 12 volt this already makes our life a lot easier so if you're doing large scale projects or or projects in general I'd say up to 10 meters five volt LED strip that can work if you want to do 20 meters go to Buck converters or things like this something like that or go to a 12 volt strip like ws-2815 or ws2011 its characteristics are slightly different as I mentioned with the per 3 addressable Etc but generally these calculation values will also work for that strip but you can now do these calculations yourself using the values from the power powersheet or the real world power seat okay let's go to scenario three and scenario three if we look back what that was scenario three is 24 volt 20 meter ws2011 720 LEDs per meter cob LED strip now this is very different LED strip it basically has a built-in diffuser and it has 36 LEDs per zone or rather it has 12 green red and blue LEDs per Zone and then they call it 720 LEDs meter if you compare it with the other strips it kind of It kind of comes down to 240 LEDs a meter still um let's calculate with that because that's going to be interesting 5 meter 16 feet users and well I don't know from head so I I need to look at my own sheet and here we have our 24 volt sheet and the newest addition to this to that is our addressable neon here that I call it and that is ws28 well it's ws2811 it has 100 addressable zones so you have a five meter strip and every 50 millimeters or five centimeter is an addressable Zone that actually has 12 red 12 green and 12 blue Led Led diodes in there interleaved together so it makes a really nice diffused effect since this is spread over multiple LED higher voltage strip we can now again use our 50 RGB white value so oh that's this one and looking here we see it uses let's say 60 watts okay 60 watts so 20 meter or 64 feet uses uh well we're going to calculate almost everything right 240 Watts now you're going to say wait that's way more wattage than the other ones yes but I'll also say that this cob LED strip is the most vibrant and um I think has the most light output versus all the others still 240 Watt divided by 24 volt well I really don't need a calculator for that but that's only 10 apps so stepping up the voltage to 24 volt again really lowers our amperage much more again now let's quickly say recommended power supply is 300 watt I could calculate 20 but yeah let's say 300 watt and then we need to do our injections now I'm going to copy this one um yeah and let's quickly remove this oh because we're kind of in a pickle here if we want to calculate our injections we know that a front injection does eight or four and an end injection also does four but we kind of need 10. hmm yeah that sucks now let's take a look at the power sheet again if we can get away with it we calculate with 50 percent White but a single color basically uses about 45 watt so that's already less than 60. let's keep that in mind and looking at the effects none of the effects uses more than the 45 watt of a single color it's interesting so let's say we're going to cheat a little bit and we're not going to be using um cheat mode on we're not going to be using a 5 meter uses 60 watt but we're going to say 45 watt now 20 meter uses I'll calculate 181 180 watt divided by 24 volt 7.5 I'm Dutch I'm I live in Europe a comma and then behind it is like you know the comma I I don't understand why us people use a dot it doesn't make sense to me so we need 7.5 amps for that oh 7.5 amps we can do with a front and end injection so now you have a choice are you going to follow the 50 white rule and this would enable you to do single colors all effects and even dual colors and with dual colors I mean a color that combines this say 100 red and 50 blue to make purple or you know 100 red and 100 blue again to make another shade of purple that would use more power but are we going to do that or are we just going to run effects or maybe we don't care that much if it's full brightness power or if it then encounters a scenario where it doesn't have enough we can use the wled power limiter set it to 8 amps and then if one of those scenarios would happen it will just lower the brightness slightly maybe we're okay with that or just you know as I said we're just gonna do effects because if we use our cheat mode we could do a front oh and end injection and leave it at that for 20 meters that's that's a whole lot of LED strip for you know just a frontal end injection but I actually have four of these and I have tested it and it works fine unless you ask too much of it as I said if you want 100 without any voltage drop of dual colors you will see some dimming in the middle unless you limit W led to 8 amps but then the whole strip will be slightly limited so that it's still an even distribution of the brightness personally I feel depending on what you demand this could be a viable scenario and would work just fine um but if you're saying no no no I need to be able to run the maximum well then you need to do more injections and for instance um the 240 watt we calculated earlier earlier is already the 50 nominal value if you say this will be the last scenario scenario three Ultra mode okay Ultra mode 100 RGB white all the time okay let's let's go there going back to Chrome and we see here that the maximum the strip uses is 112 Watt oh wait no yeah 112 Watt that's quite a lot that's quite a lot okay so let's do our calculations for that five meter is one out of 12 watt 20 meter is 448 watt power supply should be 500 watt you can get one of those nice uhp 500 minus 25 so meanwhile excellent passive power supply can do 500 watt all day long and very nice 500 watt divided by 24 volt is no no no no no 448 18.66 Watts 18. amps starting to lose it too many calculations okay 18.66 amps Let's uh let's go here and um well we're gonna have to cheat a little bit again because we just we're just not getting there because if we do front oh I can just copy this from here because it's basically the same scenario as that total is 16 amps now I'm thinking this will be close enough because we're in these calculations we're seeing that basically the strip is not transporting any power at all and all the power has to come through the power injections and yada yada that's not fully true I'd say this is close enough right there's always a little bit of margin there but that also means we already know what kind of cables we need for that because well this scenario basically just applies it's it's the same scenario it's the same calculations it doesn't matter if it's 5 volt 12 volt or 24 volt calculating amps is amps and that cable can carry that much amps with so much voltage drop now that's not completely true so if we take a look at our middle injection here we need it 11 meters with 8 amps that was our 12 volt calculation let's go to our voltage drop calculator real quick and we're saying we need 24 volts or yeah for 11 meters and 8 amps hey now we can use 16 gauge but before we said we need it 12 gauge why is that explained this before the 10 rule scales with voltage so at 5 volt we can drop 0.5 volt at 12 volt we can drop 1.2 volts and a 24 volt we can drop 2.4 volts and in this case it means that we end up below the 10 percent drop figure where if this was 12 volt we wouldn't right because now we're dropping 2.3 volt which indeed makes sense which is below the 2.4 for 24 volt but not below 1.2 so we can copy some of it but we still have to do the calculations so we can use thinner cable here for a middle injection and again A dequad or a dig OCTA would be a perfect fit so well we already kind of started bodging the last scenario into multiple versions and Uber modes and things like that I'm hoping this makes it clear how to calculate your your own LED setup that you want to build figure out the total wattage figure out the amp that is at the voltage you're going to be using for the LED chip you're using with that you can figure out how many injection points you need front will do four milde will do eight you need I don't know 20 divided over the points you have evenly spaced out as much as possible then you know your injection points then you also know the distance to those injection points calculate with distance and amps using the voltage drop calculator and now you know everything you need wire diameter power supply fusing injection points everything to run a nominally correct and well-functioning led setup right I'm probably going to repeat that one more time but so there's two more topics to discuss do I need multiple data connections and 33r resistor mode now for do I need multiple data connections I'm again going to refer to an article on my website we go to digitally adjustable LEDs and then we go to what is the maximum amount of addressable LEDs per controller they said 100 no so here I'm going to scroll down a little bit basically in short the technical part of it is the ws28 11 12 whatever protocol is a fixed rate protocol so that protocol always runs at 800 kilohertz if you have 100 LEDs that means each of those LEDs can get 333 updates a second now that's well above human visibility right but if we now have 500 LEDs you're now at 66 updates per second per LED and we generally want to be around 68 frames per second to have fluid motion Now wled by default you can now set it in the newest versions runs at 42 frames per second how many LEDs can we then run with our fixed rate protocol 793.6 I already did the calculations for you um that is however without any overhead and any hiccups or things like that or the processor on the esp32 taking just a little bit longer so I generally say for a single data output you don't want to connect more than 600 LEDs that keeps you nicely above the 42 frames per second at 55 frames per second and well that works very nicely for um you know the data outputs but then in our scenarios we're connecting five meters with 300 LEDs times four so that's 1200 LEDs in scenario one and in scenario two scenario 3 is different so let's take a quick look at that do I need multiple data connections everyone yes one times five meter is 100 addressable zones times four is four hundred zones so since it's not per single LED addressable the amount of addressable LEDs goes down that goes out of a single data port and now we only need one single data channel so even for scenario two If instead of if ws2815 you'd gone for ws2811 with per 3 addressable that means we don't have 1200 LEDs in total 2 times 600. we have one third of that so you know math that is again 400 zones okay so with ws2815 you need two data channels and you need to wire that up so you need to have two strips together or 600 and you need to cut the data connection and then you have another section of two strips of three units or 600. so you'll have to have two data wires coming from your controller one to the front of the strip then you have strip one strip two cut data connection and then run another data wire from your controller and if this is a long length I recommend running two wire cable so with the data signal and ground together in that cable to the third led the front of the third LED strip have the data cut there and basically inject data there from the second LED channel to keep those 1200 LEDs in total running at a nice and good frame rate hope that makes sense and well depending on the type of LED you you got like you know 12 volt 24 volt ws28 um well that's a good one 2814 or SK 6812 there's a a slightly different uh thing there RGB versus rgbw the above values are calculated with having three diodes per LED chip but if you now have four that's going to eat up basically some time of our fixed rate protocol so now to keep 60 frames per second we can only do 416 LEDs or to keep 42 which is W default we can have 595.2 so for RGB W's I try to keep within 500 but if you really can't because you know the strips are five meters with 300 LEDs um you can do 600 but your frame rate will drop a little bit it's not that like it's not going to work but the animations will just have less points to go to basically so it'll be a little bit choppier but then again if you move to 12 volt ws20 2814 tm1814 or SK 6812 or 24 volt variants of those while the amount of addressable zones drops quickly with the per 3 and per 6 and then it's again much less of a problem okay I think we've said enough about that subject the last thing on our list is 33r resistor mode well we go we go our website we go to adjustable LEDs and there's an article and a video there called the myth of the LED data resistor or data signal cable conditioning and basically all of the Dig boards so the Uno the the quad and the Dig OCTA nowadays have a resistor switcher on board and it depends on what type of cable you're running either you're running a data wire or you're running a data wire with ground close to it if you need to be in 249r mode or in 33r mode the default mode is 249r because that works for short distances for any setup and it basically delivers a cleaner data signal but if you have a long data wire run ground next to the data wire so I have a two wire cable that's basically attached to each other you know just cable like this you know normal cable or I'll show you this variant I guess you know and then flip that Channel with the dip switch on the Dig board to 33r mode which is optimized for having ground next to your data wire that will work a whole lot better okay I think that does it as I mentioned I'm going to mention it once more we now know how to calculate total power usage so we can figure out what power supply we need we know how to convert that amps because we know the amps and we know a single edge injection will do 4 amps and a middle injection will do 8 amps we know now how to divide our total amps that we need over the injection points and generally inject in between or at the front or end of a strip just to make it easier you can always you can inject at any point but then you have to solder and generally these strips come with those little two pick wire pigtail wires attached if we you know at the really at the front of this video we already tested that and we can use those we don't need to change those for thicker cables and we can inject power there that's a good point if you need to run a thick 12 gauge injection cable you need that cable for the distance not for the amount of amps we're going to push over it so having a small pigtail come from the controller then the thick cable for the long distance and then again a small or thinner diameter wire for injecting onto the strip because you can't solar a 12 gauge to a strip that's fine we need it for the distance not the amount of apps you know a good tip to remember anyway we now know how to calculate what wire diameter we need for each of those injection points and well I think that's everything you need to know now you can calculate your own scenarios and I always tell people come to the Discord and we'll help you out but if you've already done a schematic drawing even if it's in paint or on paper or whatever and watch this video and did these calculations we much rather verify our setup than have to think how to design your setup for you and we'll give tips like hey you can move your controller here that means these power wires that carry eight amps can be shorter and thus thinner and cheaper and things like that will help you with that but try and do your initial design yourself and if you then want us to verify it or hey like should I use a dequad or should I use a dig Octor can I run this on a dick to go come to the Discord server and will happily help you out with those things you can also comment on this video and I'll try and help people there but it's hard to do that in YouTube comments and I really rather you come to the Discord server where we can just chat and share images and things like that well this was an hour-long video which I wanted to be really short so I did a great job at that but I hope my explanations were better and you now actually understand what's going on why we need to do this and how to solve the problem okay catch you in the next video guys bye-bye [Music] thank you [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Intermit.Tech

Views: 54,744

Keywords: quinled, Dig-Uno, Dig-Quad, Dig-Octa, WLED, WLED ESP32, WLED Controller, WLED setup, Best way to set up Adressable LEDs Strip Wifi, diy, govee, govee rgbic led strip lights, esp32, diy how to, led lights, gaming room leds, led light strip, wled esp32, easy wled, wled easy setup, wled for beginners, ws2812b, wled setup, voltage injection, power injection, how to wire up LED strip, ws2812b voltage drop, prevent voltage drop, wire diameter, quinled.info, quinled-dig-uno, quinled-dig-quad

Id: Umo6jKLfwsQ

Length: 72min 41sec (4361 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 09 2023