How To - Make Custom Pixel Extension Wires

[Music] hi this is steve with knee family lights welcome back in today's video i'm going to show you how to make custom pixel extension wires so a lot of different types of wires out there and i'm going to show six different types that i have on hand i'll show how they can be wired up compare their electrical performance and see how they do with a bunch of pixels last i'll compare the cost and quality and see if they're worth the time putting these things together if you're looking to make custom wires for power injection only the results are still the same you can see how well they work to deliver that power if you find this video helpful click that like and subscribe now let's get right to it [Music] when i first got started in 2017 i purchased a bunch of the 10 foot pixel extension wires just so that way i'd have uh any number of them to just grab and hook up the pixels and my thought was i had extra wires and i saw the forms a number of ways to wire them up so i had some wires and went ahead and made some of my own custom ones for runs that are much longer let's take a look at the different options that i have here first up on the list is the standard pixel 10 foot three quart extension cables number two is stranded copper cat5e cable number three is solid cat5e copper cable number four is going to be cat6 solid copper cable number five is going to be the monoprice 18 gauge four conductor pure copper cable and last but not least i'll be cutting apart one of these green landscape extension cables this is 16 3. all right let's get to it [Music] in this section i'm going to cover how to wire up these custom extensions and test electrical characteristics of each one so we can compare them against each other for most of my props they're anywhere between 10 to 20 feet from the controller and i just use these standard 10-foot extension cables and use one or two of them to make the connection there's a couple places where i have 30 foot extensions and i use three of these standard 10 foot extensions which is great and works fine and i have a number of places where i need to reach 40 feet which is the longest run in my show i ended up making some custom extension wires assuming they would be better instead of using four of these ten foot extensions in my shell i have five three are used for the rosa wreath and you can see in the video i made previously on the rosa wreath in the pre-show setup testing them and each one of those 40-foot extensions drives 232 pixels each i have another one for the seven garage snowflakes that could be much shorter as i thought i needed something much more complicated to connect the wires it ended up being much simpler so i don't really need a 40 foot extension but i just used it since i already made it and that drives 336 pixels and the last one i have reaches the farthest roof outline sections of my house going from the garage all the way up to the top and that handles 177 pixels [Music] that's what we have here are four 10-foot extensions one two three four and what i'm going to do is bring the multimeter in and i have this set here for resistance take the two ends and what we'll do is compare the resistance on all of these wiring options and what we want is a really low number the lower number the better meaning there'll be less voltage drop as you're pulling current through them okay so we'll bring this down here see all i can see what i'm doing alright so this one v plus pin and point nine ohms we'll go ahead and do the is going to be the ground pin should be the same 0.9 and we'll do the data pin which is the one there in the middle and also 0.9 ohms okay this one is the easiest by far you just buy them and hook them up all right let's take a look at the next one [Music] what i'm showing here is a diagram that you can use to wire up the two ends of your pigtails so that way you can run one of those lines for pixel data three lines for your 12 volt plus and four lines for your ground all right so what i have is a piece of cat5e this is the solid core 5v cable get a couple pigtails male and female i have nice short ones that came with the pixels need a blade wire cutter some strippers and heat shrink and some solder and a soldering iron for the heat shrink the 3 16 would be big enough for each of the wires individual wires and if you want to cover the whole bundle you can use the quarter inch heat shrink and shrink the whole thing now this stuff is not very easy to work with just because there's a lot of small wires if you get this end cut off pull off the sheathing you're going to have eight wires in here so you'll end up needing to untwist a bunch of wires and they're all bundled up you remember that wiring diagram there's a blue blue white those are wound together there's a brown brown white those are wired together a green and green white and an orange and orange white this end they're kind of twisted in any number of ways so you can see this can get kind of unwieldy to handle so i've got eight wires here and we're going to end up connecting it to the three wire pigtail there you definitely do not want to use the wire stripper on these little thin wires uh if you do so you'll end up cutting the wire and i've done that a couple times just giving it a shot so you got to use your utility blade it's a little tedious but i'm going to cut this off so just a little bit of pressure is not enough now i've got them all cut open and you can see that there's solid core copper so the orange and white which is here we'll be using for data we'll put that at the top the solid orange will be combined for ground with the two browns so that's uh orange here brown brown stripe and the solid green these are off the grounds and then for the v plus we have the solid blue the blue stripe and the green stripe so for these you'll just twist your v plus together and take your four grounds and twist those together it's always better to have more on the ground side okay and then we've got our data so you could do the same thing on both ends we'll tape our take our uh our cutter here once you have it kind of together then you can clip off the end you feel like you need to clip any of those you can this one's a little long and then clip that there put it in the helping hands we'll take the male end we have here wire strippers okay so then again this is for data this is for uh v plus and this is for ground so ideally you're going to cut more of this back so you can get your 3 16 heat shrink on here and if we switch this around so that they're in the right order so we've got v plus at the top we've got data in the middle and ground at the bottom so then you're gonna get these guys together twist them together since these pixel wires are much softer it's easier to twist the pixel wire around the solid copper or even the strand of copper do the same thing for this one and again same thing on the bottom and once you have that solder together put the heat shrink over it and um and you're all set so as you can see it's a little tedious to make these and it takes a bunch of time to cut those little wires and strip them and then to tie them up and do all the heat shrink and soldering [Music] okay so you can see on this one i've got the wiring inside there and then i've got the quarter inch heat shrink over top of the whole thing so it goes from the cat5e here over the soldered points and then out to the end on this end i have a a pixel pigtail and that one is going into the same wires here with the quarter inch heat shrink on the outside so let's bring in the multimeter and we can check for the resistance the internal resistance all right we'll start with the data line right in the middle 1.4 ohms and then we'll go up to the plus line it's 0.7 ohms and we'll go to the ground line 0.6 ohms this 40-foot extension cable that i have made that's the exact same wiring so i've got the female pigtail here i end up using a pixel uh i think it's like an inch pigtail at the front and we'll check that one out so let's get our voltmeter multimeter okay let's check the resistance of these wires here so we'll start with the data line this one is using a single cat5e solid core which is 24 gauge now we're at 1.5 ohms let's check the ground line 0.6 and the v-plus line 0.8 ohms [Music] okay next is the cat6 i have this wire but didn't use this in any of my shows so what i have is i went ahead and stripped everything and instead of soldering it all together i just use the wiggle nuts so you can see here i've got on the ground line coming in going to the pigtail is four wires for the data is one and then for the v plus it's those three and another end of the same thing we've got this wired up same colors for the v plus there are three wires the data is the one and then for the ground is four all right so let's bring in the multimeter i will say that the cat6 cable was pretty unwieldy to handle that solid core is a little bit thicker than cat5e and it just is kind of difficult to handle and twist around together when you have a bunch of these little guys to work with so we'll start with the data pin okay 1.2 ohms on the data here's the ground pin 0.6 ohms and we'll do the b plus and point six on that one as well [Music] okay next up is the four core speaker wire so i have a little sample here you can see that it's cut and there's the four 18 gauge copper wires this is stranded and so what we'll do is we'll cut a little bit off the end here cut it open so now we've got our four wires exposed this one's a lot easier to work with than the network cable cut off the extra do the same on the other side in this case you can just use your wire stripper grab the wire one two three four and as long as you wire these consistently like you could use white for data and then you could use red for v-plus and then use black and green for ground and just twist these two together you're going to want to have a nice thick ground line and then you've got these two do the same thing for the other side and when you solder this up put them in your hands match them up and in this case i would do red to red white to white and then blue to the green and black the quarter inch of the 3 16 inch heat shrink on this line over here is going to be a little tight so if you have something a little bit bigger that would work or use the quarter inch and do your best to shrink it down okay i have [Music] the wires that were used with the rosa wreath that extension [Music] so here's the cable used for the rosary there's actually three sets here i've got one two and this is the third one the third one uses the monoprice cable 18 gauge four wire the other two are using uh network cabling so in this case let's go ahead and bring in the multimeter and we'll put that on the data pin all right 0.6 on the data b plus is point five and point four for the ground okay for the last one i've got the screen extension cable this has been in the sun for a bit so the cable is a little faded i've got it pre-marked but let me go ahead and cut this first time it is right here okay so this is this was a 60 foot or 50 foot extension cable and now i have uh cut off one end and we will go ahead and cut off that end and we'll expose the wires okay these are nice and thick and do the same for the other end this is stranded 16-3 standard landscaping extension cable for your ac wiring look at that go ahead and cut off this and end this end wire strippers work on these bigger cables they work great same for this side okay i have two pigtails here male and a female and i'm using this product here which is a lever nut it's a different style this is the um xhf three conductor if you saw my video on my show setup in and everything that's in there this is one of my favorite options for a quick repair in the field to do any pixel repair you just need two of these and you can do the repair within minutes and then come back later and do a solder job or something else to get these back out so this box comes with 25 basically you can do 12 pixel repairs and get them back to do future repairs so we'll go ahead and twist these wires up so they're nice and tight together the 16 gauge wire and i'm gonna open up the lever so we'll pick pick black to go for ground to correspond with blue we'll do white for the data this little connectors are straight through so that blue ground will go straight through to the black the white here will go straight through to the white and the red wire will go straight through and we'll just use the green for b plus and then i can pull on them and they're definitely snug all right you can see how quick this is to do if you have to do a pixel repair in the field okay so we'll do the other end twist the wires okay in this case it's a different order because this is the female so red is on the right and we used green for the red over here so we use green line it up for the red and white for the data and then black the ground pull all the wires they're super snug okay [Music] let's bring the multimeter in and we'll do our resistance test and we'll start with the data line 0.6 all right 0.5 there we go all right so we got v and ground is 0.5 the data showed 0.6 but it probably would be 0.5 as well [Music] all right so here's our test setup i've got my ammo box with a falcon f16 v3 and this is version 1.0 i'm using the first output here i've got the power supply set at 12 volts calibrated i won't be using the distro board just one output output number one here and what i've got on the end of that is one of these test meters that's also calibrated we'll have our test subject here also we'll check the voltage at the beginning and we can see how much power is being drawn through there and on this end we're going to have 200 pixels so for this setup i've got 100 pixels here another 100 pixels there they're connected in the middle at the beginning we'll have a volt meter as well so we can check for voltage there and to balance the power across these 200 pixels i have the self power injection wiring here that i've used before in other videos got a meter here at the back end so we can see what that looks like coming across this self power injection wire and then in the middle where the voltage is going to be the lowest because we're not self power injecting we'll use a meter here to see what the voltage is there all right [Music] this setup why don't we go ahead and first connect the 10 foot extension going to get a baseline here for whether or not we need to use an fm so i have an fmp here and let's see how it works using one 10-foot extension cable and the f-amp is just in case we might need it so let's see if we can get all the meters in view we've got that one we're at 11 11.6 here at the end of the 10 feet 11.5 on the other end of the self power injection and 11.2 at the middle here and this is while everything's off no load let's go ahead and turn on the lights for white all right that looks great we got 8.4 in the middle 9 7 here 10 3 at the end of 10 feet and 11.3 at the beginning let's go ahead and add a another 10 foot extension cable all right we're having some issues already let's put this back in all right so we're getting data corruption already 20 feet coming off driving 200 pixels we're still having data issues so we'll go ahead and see if we can clean up the data signal coming off the falcon using an f amp what's really interesting is when i did the test in the video for how far pixel data can go i was using a little tester and that little tester i thought would have worse performance but it's what i've been seeing here is the little tester actually has a better output data characteristic than the falcon all right so now we've got that let's turn everything on and make sure we plug it in okay there we go so now we've got clean data so we're running through 20 feet we have 11.3 volts the beginning 3.55 amps and we're 8.9 here 7.2 at the end so we're still good anything around 7 volts will have a nice clean color and three and a half amps is about how many tips we should expect to see at the beginning here driving 200 pixels that are very well balanced so that way let's go ahead and add another one so now we're putting out the 30 feet here we'll see if we can get up to 40. okay so now at the beginning we're at 11.3 at the end of the extension through the loss in the cable we're at 7.8 already 7.5 at the end of the self power injection and then 6.3 in the middle at the weakest pixel here and it's flickering a little bit on the far right so let's try a 40-foot extension so that 30 foot extension is right at the edge and this is at 30 brightness so let's add the fourth one let's see if we get a enough voltage to power all 200 okay so now we're 11.3 at the beginning we've dropped down to 7.2 volts there at the 7.1 7.2 at the end of the extension cable and the current is dropped down to two two 3.28 we got six point nine at the end and then in the middle here the weakest pixel is 5.7 and it's definitely definitely flickering so let's swap it out and see how the stranded cat5e looks we'll give it a shot and see if we can do this without that hand so here's the stranded cat5e take the f amp out okay there's that meter and we got a lot of flickering we're showing five volts here at the end and that is not going to work and their data got corrupted so it was brighter than the 30 percent and i could tell and the current on the front end was over five amps so that's definitely not going to work let's go ahead and put the f amp in all right so that vamp is going to go into the extension cable here go ahead and turn off the lights okay so what i want to show here is without anything being powered with the lights off let's just call it that we're at 11.9 volts at the front it is drawing 0.7 amps which is 5 of the pixels power just keeping the chips running so 11.9 at the beginning to 11.3 so we have already just running across this cable i have 0.6 volts that have dropped showing the same 11.2 there and then a little bit less in the middle 10.9 and let's go ahead and turn them back on okay so we've got is three and a half amps 11.3 at the end it's dropped down now to 8.5 volts the jumper crosses at 8.2 and the weakest pixel is down here at 6.9 so that's around seven these pixels look totally fine all right let's go ahead and switch out to the solid core cat5e since this is going to be very similar to the strain of cat5e we'll leave the f amp in in fact we'll leave the fan pan for the rest of them because they're going to need it okay coming off the f amp going into the solid core cat5e go ahead and turn off the light so we can get a baseline of how much voltage we have lost so with no load we're starting at 11.2 at the end there 11.9 so we have about a 0.7 volt drop and then 10.9 at the middle on the weakest so go ahead and turn on the lights so now we're drawing three and a half amps here and we've dropped from 11.3 down to 8.2 the jumper is at eight and then the weakest one is at 6.7 and these pixels actually look look fine okay let's try the cat 6. all right here's the solid quartet six and we're going to leave that vamp in one end all right so our meters have power so we're going from 11 9 to 11 4 so just a half a volt drop and then the weakest over here under no load is 11.1 let's go ahead and turn everything on so now everything on full white we go from 11 3 at the front to 9.1 at the end of the extension and then our weakest pixel is at 7.5 so a market improvement improvement in the amount of voltage at the weakest pixel running the cat6 cable all right let's go ahead and switch out check out the four core speaker wire here's the four core speaker wire coming off of the f amp and it's this one here it's a lot of wire here because it's the um it's the three set of wires for the rosa wreath but i'm using the one that's made with the speaker wire okay under no load we're going from 11 8 to 11.5 so just a 0.3 drop versus 0.5 and then the weakest pixel down here is at 11.1 volts let's turn on the white all right so now we're sitting at 9.4 volts at the end of the extension run open three at the beginning and then the weakest pixel is at 7.8 volts and they look fantastic all right now let's try the 16 3 extension cable i'm curious i actually haven't done this one yet so let's try it without the f amp all of these need the f amp the f amp is because there's too much noise in the line from the current running through these wires causing the data to not be able to be read accurately so here we are giving it a good old landscape cable and we'll see if this works all right so this is um the no load it's looking really good so this is a 11 8 only a 0.2 volt drop between the beginning and end here of the extension cable 16 3 and then we have 11.2 at the weakest pixel let's go ahead and turn on the lights see if it works and it does not so even with this extension cable the data signal is not strong enough it's too much noise in the line so we'll put the fan back in okay there we go we'll turn the lights on okay so we have eleven three at the beginning okay that's surprising and then we're at seven nine all right 40 feet of 16 3 extension cable all right let's take a look at all this data together [Music] all right so we're back in excel and as usual i will have a link to this file in the description below so we've got this cleaned up here we're taking a look at our six different types of cables same information here that we measured earlier on internal resistance in ohms for the three different lines across these six different cables i changed this title here this is the estimated wire gauge not the actual effective wire gauge this is estimated based upon labeling or kind of a range based upon what these cables are supposed to be at as far as the gauge and then 18 for the model price and the landscape wiring at 16. so as we move to the right here what i've gathered together is the data associated with all the pixels being off so this is the minimum load of just having the pixels powered nothing running they're all about the same around 11.8 at the beginning 11.9 they're all drawing 0.7 amps which is um that five percent of the pixels power for the 200 pixels so they're all just kind of sitting there drawing 8.3 amps at the end of each of these you can see the wires with the with the the lowest resistance have the least amount of voltage drop even with just a small amount of current so the four core three uh the three core four 10-foot extension wires has a drop of almost a full volt so 0.9 and then we can see that it gets better here and between the stranded and cat5 and the solid cat5 it looks like the solid is a little bit um actually the stranded is a little bit better a slightly slightly bit and it's also easier to handle so if you're if you have the stranded i just go with that if you have solid that's fine too just kind of work with what you got the solid cat 6 has a little less voltage drop and then the monoprice pure copper is about the same as the um the landscape wiring just note that we have two wires in the ground there you can see also the voltage in the middle is better as you go down this list and then the uh voltage at the end as well all right let's keep scrolling to the right so what i have tabulated here is the data associated with um under load so these are the 200 pixels 12 volts regulated running at 30 brightness and with them all at pure white uh full white 30 brightness they've all dropped down to 11.3 this is kind of the voltage drop between the power supply going through the pigtail you can see they're all about the same the better quality wiring has slightly higher amperage running through that first meter and that's because it's um providing better uh voltage across the entire set so more current can kind of flow through the wattage is all about the same and the voltage at the end of the extension cable is listed here so you can see um the four core the four 10 foot three core pixel wire extension wires had the most amount of drop it got to 7.2 volts just at the end of the extension cable and at the end of the run it was 6.9 and then right in the middle where there was no support for the voltage it dropped to 5.7 and in this case it didn't work as you saw so you definitely don't want to use those extension cables that are labeled as 20 gauge tested maybe a little bit a little bit thinner than that but somewhere around there the cat5e stranded did a little bit better than the cat6 and note all of these did work yes yes yes yes yes down here um i do have a column to the right one more and they all needed enough amp uh unfortunately um so that was kind of surprising when i was taking a look at all this data that the fm was needed for all of these runs um all right so the cat6 uh if you take a look here the voltage in the middle pixels this is the key one to look at this is where the power comes to the first and the 200th pixel with the self power injection wires and so the weakest pixels are the ones right in the middle so as long as it's around seven or higher then we're going to have a good quality color and brightness and we won't have any flickering 6.9 6.7 those actually looked fine so you can get away with the cat5e whether it's stranded or solid it is a significant improvement to cat6 although that cable is a lot harder to work with it's much stiffer and then the 18 gauge speaker wire did great at 7.8 and surprisingly the landscape wiring came in at at the best score here so if you've got a lot of that stuff sitting around from the ac days you go ahead and cut it up it's relatively inexpensive um so on that why don't we take a look at how much these things cost for those 40 foot extensions [Music] built the cables and we've seen how well they work now let's take a look at cost for each of these i took a look at five different vendors that sell the ten foot three core pixel extension cables and they range in price from three dollars and thirty two cents up to five dollars each so for four of them it would be thirteen dollars and twenty eight cents up to twenty dollars you can see how that compares to making your own cable it's definitely much more convenient to have these and just grab whatever you need and it saves you a lot of time as it's just just easy to go for the rest of these cables the cat5e price those at model price the bulk cable pricing of a thousand feet spools so you can see that the stranded cat5 comes in at 399 for a 44 40 foot piece the solid cat 5e comes in at 308 and the solid cat6 comes in at four dollars and 12 cents now for all three of these they're relatively close in price the solid cat 5 is definitely less expensive the strenycat5 performed a little bit better and then the cat 6 performed the best but between the three of those the stranicat 5e is going to be the easiest to work with that's going to do much better in the cold weather for bending and handling and it won't tend to crack and break i've heard other people have those issues the monoprice 4 core speaker wire is priced using a 500 foot spool and that one comes out to 10 dollars and 40 cents it's a it's quite a bit pricier than the cat5e cable it is a lot easier to work with connecting your pigtails to them and last but not least the 16-3 green holiday extension cords that you can get at the big box stores this came out to about seven dollars and fifteen cents using a 100 foot extension cable so you can make two 40-foot cables and those cables are pure copper and stranded so they'll work really well in the cold and they won't tend to crack or break and should last you for many years and that is it for this video i did not include the price of the pigtails and the cost comparison as it would be the same for any of the custom extension cables that you make for the vendor-based cables they're super convenient require no work on your part but they did not perform for the 40 foot extension test and they do cost the most if you're going to use the monoprice speaker wire or the 16 3 holiday wiring that actually works out pretty good and it's the quickest but is also a bit more expensive than using any of the network cables for the network cables all three of those options work just fine it's the least expensive those wires are quite a bit more time consuming to put together so let me know in the comments below what other wires did you use and how well did they work for you i hope you found this video useful until next time we'll see you [Music]

Channel: Ni Family Lights

Views: 24,091

Keywords: Xlights, xlight sequence, pixel, pixel show, megatree, FPP, Falcon Pi Player, Falcon Controller, F16v3, F16, Light Show, Pixel Lights, Christmas Lights, Christmas Show, Ni Family Lights, NiFamilyLights, Ni Lights, NiLights, Ni, Vienna, Falcon, Falcon F16v3, Pixel Extensions, Pixel Wiring, Network to Pixel Wiring, Custom Pixel Wires, Custom Pixel Wiring, Custom Pixel Extensions, Cat5e Pixel Wiring, Cat6 Pixel Wiring, Extension Cord Pixel Wiring

Id: Mpr0NX9HaPQ

Length: 47min 45sec (2865 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 21 2021