Installing Permanent LEDs w/ DrZzs in Las Vegas - Voltage Injection - RGB Strips in Aluminum Channel

how's it going we're at my brother-in-law's house that's ak we're putting some lights up and it seemed like too good of an opportunity not to video and go through the process even though i've gone through it many times seems like every time we go through it we come up with something new or somebody learns something new so here we are let's walk through what we're doing [Music] my sister wanted strips she likes the way the strips look so we're doing strips the best way to mount it is with that aluminum channel so this is the aluminum channel and then these lights that we're using these strips these are the ip65 strips so they just have like a coating of silicone on the outside so they will probably eventually kind of discolor and turn yellow but they should work pretty well this is las vegas it doesn't rain a lot here so they're not going to get really wet or get a lot of moisture on them so they should be pretty good the biggest problem that we found so far has been trying to get wires from the inside to the outside of the attic so we put several holes in the side of the house before we finally were able to get some wires through so we've got wires here this is going to be a positive negative and data that's poked through here and run inside where we will have the power supply and the controller so we tested everything and i want to show about voltage drop again you have to check things before you install them so we put it all out here turned it all on made sure it worked before we hung it up on the house but that brought up a really important point that i could show you about voltage drop so what we've got connected here is a 5 volt power supply i don't know how big it is but i'm sure it's a big 60 amp power supply we're actually using a node mcu and a sacrificial pixel the node mcu is connected to plus and minus here plus and minus is connected to the power supply here then the data wire comes off of the sacrificial pixel goes into this green wire which goes and eventually connects to this connector here right there and then the other end of the plus and minus from here goes all through this wire and comes out here this is going to one spool of leds there's 150 leds here uh 16 feet and then it goes to the next spool just connected the connectors like that so that goes to the next spool and then to the next one and then to the next one so this is about how many leds we're going to need i think we'll end up cutting a few off the end but this is about what we need so when i turn it on i want to show you what happens because it demonstrates very well when you need to add voltage so here we go okay so look at these together this is the first spool right nice and yellow then you get here and it's a little more orangish red and then this is red and then this is red and really dim right if you compare all these you can see the difference it's pretty obvious that something's going wrong right so what's going wrong is that by the time you get to this spool here your voltage is no longer five volts now you're down somewhere three something volts probably right so that's why they're dim and that's why the colors aren't right so to fix that we're basically going to just take five volts again from the beginning and tie it in here so i know i'm everybody's gonna go crazy because i'm doing this one that's live but whatever so if i just twist in five volts again here and oh look at that okay so basically all i did was just jump five volts from here the main power that was going to the first strip of leds over here and i just connected it here also so i won't be able to do this when we actually install it we'll have to have another long wire like this that'll run to this point but that's what we're going to do we're just going to add another pair of wires like this run them along this strips all along all along and then connect them here so that we end up with nice bright lights at the end as well now we got to put them all up so zack's arm is going to get really tired because he's going to be our tripod all the whole time yeah okay let's go so we decided we're going to fish a whole separate pair of wires back for our voltage injection so this is a why or what would you what do you call this just a fish tape i call it fish tape fish tape okay it's this real sturdy kind of wiry thing we're gonna push it through this hole and then we're gonna go to the other side and we're gonna grab it tie some wires to it and then pull it through it's a real pain in the butt if you can't find this when you get to the other side but we've done it now already we've already done the hard part we're just doing it again so hopefully it'll be easier this time so here's the hole these are the wires already going through we're just going to take the fish tape and stick it in there go way in there i see i'm hitting something there it goes all right i'm past it whatever it was now we go to the other side and see what we find okay you see what he's doing over there he's taking down christmas lights you know what he's never gonna do ever again put up take down christmas lights never ever again or put him up this is the last time well i see the wires that's good all this high-tech equipment we got a rake and a two by yeah four whatever it takes would you go grab that spool of black and red wire that's out there yeah i got it all right now ak is taping the wire to the end of the fish tape nothing worse than pulling your fish tape out and pulling the wire off because you didn't tape it well enough he's actually really good though at making jokes in the videos i like it alright is he out there exactly outside [Laughter] hey that was pretty good thank you we heard the imperial march i don't know if you can hear it on the recording but we heard it here we go hey good job good job aka all right now we got plenty of wire so now we've got power injection wire that's going to go that way and we've got the data wire and the initial power wire that's going to go this way so now let's just mount a whole bunch of that aluminum channel for the next hour or whatever all the way around we're going to go all the way around here zack [Music] first separating these so that i could do them one at a time and then i'm actually holding the soldering iron with my arm and then with a little bit of pressure pushing this up against there and then it just pulls off then i can give up some pressure to the wire just pull it off again make sure that our our lines our arrows are lined up right oh my gosh that looks gorgeous now we're going to connect the wires from the end of the leds to the wires that are coming out from the attic so if you have heat shrink tubing and you've got it way down here by the edge and you solder this the wire is going to get hot and you could heat shrink your heat shrink where you don't want it it'll melt it right there so just got to make sure you push it far enough up out of the way that won't get hot in milk the last thing you want the worst possible thing is come look come look it's all up everything you need turn on it doesn't work that is it is such a disappointment especially when it happens like three times up to the attic and now off to the attic like that sure so this is our data out from this sacrificial pixel and this is our green wire that goes out to the lights so we're just gonna twist these two together we're going to connect up the controller to one spot here so that's just the negative there triple check that's negative and then positive is these last three over here so i'm going to put positive one here that will power up the board and send the data but you'd be running the power for all those lights through these tiny little wires here and they would not look very good they'd be dim and these wires may eventually even like get really hot and melt what we're gonna do is just connect these to the extra terminals that you got here so we're just gonna connect one to this one here for ground okay so one more time plus red red red minus black black black okay great now we should be able to plug this in and know if uh if it works out there okay home run we did it so we don't have the power injection so they're going to be you know red and faded down here at the end but our power injection wires are hanging from over there so we'll just tie those in when we get over there i like leaving them on when you hang them so that you know if something goes wrong while you're hanging so we got it set on a cycle mode so we got a few different effects running on uh every seven second cycle and then we're just gonna have the kids come out and see and the moms hey puppers [Applause] [Music] hello [Music] oh there you go okay sign off guys as always thanks for watching until next time on yay bye max [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 easy if you like this video and you want to see more like it this box will take you to a playlist of some of my favorites in addition to videos like this i also do live streams every sunday this box will take you to a recording of the latest live stream that's all for now adios

Channel: DrZzs

Views: 33,729

Keywords: Home Automation, Home Assistant, Sonoff, DIY, Electronics, Tasmota, Arduino, 3d printing, 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: S0g02o85fGY

Length: 13min 34sec (814 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 03 2021