WLED: Mastering Segments, Multi-pin & Multi-Controller Setups

today I'll cover some methods can be used to split up or segment an LED display when using a single W LED controller I'll show when it might be appropriate to consider utilizing more than one gopo data pen on a controller and then I'll show some options on how to combine or sync separate LED displays when using multiple W LED [Music] controllers hi welcome to resin CH Tech I've recently received a lot of questions regarding things like segments using multiple data pins and syncing multiple controllers together when using wed so in this video I'll show some of the basic options and a few use cases for how to split up your display when using a single controller then I'll cover some options and ways to sync or join multiple controllers together let's get started by taking a look at the controllers LEDs and other parts I'll be using for my test setup [Music] I'll be using a very basic wed controller using an esp32 mini I'm using an esp32 because it can theoretically support up to 10 different GPI pin for your data output for your LEDs but W LED's official site recommends a maximum of four GP pins and for the most part I'll be following the recommendations from the wed website in this case I have two data lines out connected to gpio 16 and 17 in fact I've actually built two of these controllers and they are identical but the reason I have two of them is so I can show you some of the options for syncing multiple controllers together if you've never built a wed controller before I do have another video that will show you in about 15 minutes how to build your own controller and connect it up to a string of LEDs and while that video and what I'm doing here today is done on a simple breadboard I also have videos we show you how to create soldered versions using both esp8266 and ESP 32 connecting peripherals like buttons and motion sensors and remote controls if you're interested in any of those I have a video playlist of all my different LED videos and projects and I'll throw a card up at the end of this video linking to that I flashed both controllers with the latest standard production version of wld which is 0.14.31 15 minutes so you can check that out if needed as I won't go through the steps again here but it really is pointand Click nowadays including the steps for connecting the controller to your Wi-Fi just be sure to note the mac and or IP address to the controller once the install is complete I'll be using 10 MERS of ws2812b LEDs at 60 LEDs per meter for a grand total of 600 LEDs I'll be powering everything by a 5vt 30 amp power supply which if you've watched some of my other videos you'll realize that is slightly under underpowered for 600 LEDs but I know from past experience I'm going to have to turn the LEDs way down dim to be able to film them so this would be enough but if I was doing a permanent install I would most likely use a 40 amp power supply here I also have some miscellaneous jst connectors some wo clips and a few other parts and as always you can find links to everything that I show in this video down in the video description this is my high-tech LED test board which you may have seen me use in other videos in this particular case I have eight Columns of 75 LEDs each now besides power at the beginning of the strip I'm also injecting power mid strip and at the end of the strip and for this first test I'm going to be using a single controller and a single data pin from the esp32 now according to the official wed website you should use a maximum of 512 LEDs per pin for perfect performance but can use up to 800 LEDs per pin for very good performance at 600 LEDs I'm slightly over the recommended perfect number and if I were to add many more LEDs I'd definitely consider using multiple data pins which we'll take a look at here shortly but before we get to multiple data pin I want to cover the use of segments okay I've got all the LEDs connected and you can see here that they're wired in a serpentine fashion just as they're showing in the pattern here and the only thing I've done to so far is I've gone into my LED preferences told it the type of LEDs the GPI pin and the length which again is 600 LEDs now when you do that in wed it's going to create a default main segment or segment zero now the starting LED is everything here is zero base so it starts with LED zero and a stop LED of 600 now note that the stop LED is not part of the segment itself this would actually mean I have 601 LEDs if that stop LED was included so really think of is the starting LED being zerob based and the stop LED actually being the number of pixels in that segment hey now let's say I want to divide this LED strip up into two segments I'm just going to divide it right now right down the middle 300 on each segment so I can control each of these independently with different effects and colors so to do that I come over here to my starting segment and I'm going to cut this down to have a length of 300 so it's going to start with led0 and actually go up to 299 I'll set that to 300 and I will save that and now notice how it turned off the other LEDs those other ones I can come down here and add a segment and it's already defaulted to the starting LED of 300 cuz that's where this one ended remember this stop LED is not included in this prior segment goes up through a length of 600 or 300 to 600 with the length so I'll go ahead and save that and you notice that that automatically became solid Now to control these independently you've got check marks indicating which segment you want to control so if I just want to change what's displayed over here I can change that that to a different effect and a different color and different brightness everything you could normally do so now I've got two different effects running on a single LED strip with a single data pin and a single controller now there are a few interesting things you can do let me set this down here to the same dry WIP as the other one okay and I'll set it to the same I don't remember what colors I used before so now they look like two individual strips that are synced together an interesting thing that you can do if you come back over to your segment over here I can actually reverse the direction on one now they're going to run opposite of each other there's also an option to do what's called a mirror effect what that does is that takes this particular segment and more or less splits it in half and runs a mirror on each half of that particular segment we turn that back off turn off the reverse direction as well that was easy enough again to create two segments again you just got to be sure whichever segment you want to control so let's leave that segment on that that and this time let's go back and change segment one and we'll just put it into something we'll put it back over here into this so now I'm controlling that segment if I select both segments and now I go back and I select something like my try wipe again notice that that affected both segments they're still op operating independently of each other notice I'm not getting a single Serpentine all the way across with the tri effect but now I'm getting the the tri wipe effect on both of of my segments so that's probably the most confusing thing when you start getting into segments is making sure that you're selecting the particular segment that you want to control and change the effect on or again if they're all checked it'll apply that particular effect or color or brightness setting to all segments and of course you can always remove segments after you've created them so I'll just simply click the trash can and notice it removed this segment I could actually set this one back to 600 and save that now I'm back to the original way that wed was set up with all this being in one segment a note you can Define up to 10 segments currently in W LED so what I've done now is I've now created four segments of 150 LEDs each and notice that each one of my segments is running a different effect once again if I want to change the effect on just one segment I select the segment that I want to change so let's select this one and let's just change that to something like that but if I actually want to apply changes to all four segments I can select all four of them come down here and select a single effect and notice that it is applied to all of them now do notice each one kept the previous color settings that's why they don't look exactly the same there are some different colors so I would just have to come back over here and apply a single color to all of them to get them all to line up and work together so by using segments you can do a lot of different things depending on how your LEDs are laid out and there there's actually even more things you can do that I'm not going to cover here but by using grouping and spacing you can actually interweave these segments into each other so say I've got like four LEDs and I skip four LEDs add four LEDs I can actually inter inter leave or overlay multiple segments on top of each other if you want to know more about that check out the wed website now one limitation here of segments is your LED strips have to be wired in one continuous run just like they are if you're only using a single segment so if you've got long distance between LEDs that you want to have in segments you could have issues with either needing to boost that data line or just may not be conducive to wiring these two segments together that's where we could look at something like multiple pins which is what we're going to take a look at next but before I do that I'm going to go ahead I'm going to delete each of these segments that I had defined here before and we're going to set our initial segment back to 600 so we just have a single segment like we had when we first set everything up currently all 600 LEDs are controlled from a single data pin from the esp32 to split this up to use two data pin of 300 LEDs each we need to break the data connection here so by using a second data pin shown by the blue wire here we now have the first 300 LEDs controlled by the original data pin and and the second 300 LEDs controlled by the second data pin I've also added additional power injection points so that each 300 LED section has power at the beginning and the end of the strip so now back over in wld notice only the first 300 pixels are lit up even though we still have it defined for 600 because we no longer have that data connection between the first and second half so now we need to go into our configuration our LED preferences and set up that second data pin so here's our first data pin the first thing we need to do is we need to shorten that to 300 and now we need to add connection for our second data pin once again it's still the same type of strip ws2812b and it's automatically defaulting and in fact it's gray out to start at 300 but here we also have an additional length of 300 in this case I'm using GPO pin 17 for my second data line so we will save that and now notice we're back to having all of the strips lit up so we look at our segments we still have a single segment for all 600 LEDs so that means even though we have two different data pens working here I come back down once again look at this triy wipe and I'll set the colors back up again notice it is still acting like it is a single strip that is actually wired together with the data line but I now have the ability to control many more LEDs since I'm now kind of splitting that signal in that control so a situation where you might want to use multiple data pens is when you get up to over say 550 600 LEDs you need to think about using a second data pin the other option where you might want to use multiple data pens is if you have two parts of your LED display separated by a fairly long distance and depending on how you have it wired you could put a controller in the center and run a separate data line to each segment of the LED display now again this can be treated like a single LED strip even though it's two data pin or we could do simply like we did before and we could create two separate segments and save that and now it's just like we had before we have two separate segments but in this particular case each run one is running off of a separate data pin on the esp32 now there is one other situation where using multiple data pins may come into play that is if you happen to have a display made up of different types of LED strips so notice back in our configuration both of mine happen to be ws2812b there's nothing saying that this second set of strips couldn't be something like sk6812 so in this case I could actually have a section of my display using ws2812 another section using sk6812 and they would actually work together now obviously when you go into doing you're probably going to create segments because some things like you know the white color setting isn't necessarily going to apply to a ws2812b but you can actually mix and match different types of LED strips within a single display and using a single controller by using multiple data pins so unless you have a larger display of something like more than 5 or 600 LEDs or are mixing and matching different types of LED strips within the same display there's really no reason to use multiple pins on an esp32 as I showed earlier we can create segments and control different parts of the display independently even when using a single data pin and if you end up running the same effect on multiple segments things pretty much always stay in sync as I mentioned in the section when I talked about segment so it can be a little bit tricky remembering how to control each of these and there are only certain things that apply to segment zero and again you can look at that in the wed documentation so there is one other option using a single controller if you have multiple parts of your display and you know you'll want those multiple parts to always stay in sync and that is by splitting the data signal so instead of using two separate data pin as we did here splitting the signal means we're going to take a single data pin and we're going to split the signal out and send it to both sections of our LED display so one data signal coming out and it's being sent both to the start and to the second half of the display so each half of the display is going to receive the same exact signal from the wed controller this has some pros and definitely has some cons back over in wed I've reset all this back to the original 600 pixels but in this particular case with a split signal wed should think that it only has 300 pixels I'll show you why by once again throwing back to our Tri white now not even though we have it defined as 600 pixels it is no longer acting like a single LED strip instead it looks almost like 2 seconds and notice there a big long delay here that's because wed is trying to light up pixels 301 through 600 which don't exist because we split that signal so to fix that we need to come over to our config to our LED preferences and we need to say we have a length of 300 and save that now if we go back notice when it reaches the end of the strip here it immediately starts over again so as far as wled is concerned it's really only talking to 300 pixels it's sending out that single signal and we're splitting that across the two different sections of 300 pixels each now the one nice thing about this it assures that no matter what you do everything will stay in sync because each half of the LEDs are receiving the same exact signal from W LED and we're doing this without any segments so we should just have a single segment of 0 to 300 LEDs now you can't do this with different types of LED strips because we only have one LED strip one pin defined and also notice there's no way to separate these and do a second effect on the other half of the strips they're always going to be in sync and no matter what you change to one it's going to be that way for both strips so where might you want to use something like this well in my particular case this was ideal for something like my staircase I wanted the same exact signal on both sides and I wanted them to always be in sync I was never going to run a different effect on one half the stairs over the other half the stairs certainly could have done that by setting up either segments or using multiple pins in my case I was just using an esp8266 though and the recommendation for that is to only use one output pin so therefore I was able to keep both sides in sync by splitting the data signal in fact here is the actual effect I'm using on my stairs so again I have two separate LED strips that aren't physically wired together but I am sending a split data signal to each side of the staircase if you happen to have a situation where your two different sections of your LED display do not have the same number of LED pixels then you want to set up wled with the length of the longest section finally I want to talk about a situation where where you might have completely separate displays that aren't physically connected either because they're on different sides of the room or there's just no way to connect them together without long wiring runs and that is to use multiple controllers so now we'll take a look at using multiple controllers and a couple different ways that we can sync those together for the multicontroller demo I'm using two identical completely separate controllers in my case here I'm sharing a common 5vt power supply but that isn't necessary each could have its own power supply and be installed in completely different locations with no physical connection whatsoever the first controller is connected to the first 300 LEDs and the second controller to the second 300 LEDs both controllers are only using one data pin but since they are independent one could be using one data pin and the other using three data pins they could also each be connected to different types or voltages of LED strips again they are completely independent of each other I was just too lazy here to drag out and wire a second power supply so I'm sharing it between the controller and LEDs for this particular example and since they are completely independent of each other they each have their own controller and their own interface the way I've got it set up here this left controller controls the left 300 and the right interface controls the right 300 as you can tell they are completely independent of each other without any kind of syncing going on but there are a couple of different ways we can sync these to allow One controller to actually control the LED connected to a completely independent controller and the first option we're going to talk about is UDP sync the nice thing is there's a nice little sync button right here on the user interface to enable and disable this feature I'm going to turn both of these off then I'm going to turn on the sync over here on my left controller now it says other lights in the network will now sync to this one and notice if I hit the power button on this one it turned the lights on on both sides however I didn't make any changes to default wed so in this case what happened when I turned that on it turned on at least 13 other wled displays in my house everything from behind my TV to my stair lights to my kitchen cabinets all came on because they all have the default settings probably not what you're going to want unless you want to sync all of your wed displays together so there are a couple changes we need to make so that only these two controllers are synced together okay to stop the syncing of all my wed controllers there's a couple of things that we can do I'm going to turn these back off but we need to change some of the sync settings so only these two LED controllers are synced together and like a lot of things with wed there are a lot of different ways to do this but the first I'm going to show if we come down here to our sync interfaces notice that there are up to eight sync groups available this was available starting with version 0.13 I believe and what I can do is I can take this first controller and say it's going to send and receive in sync group two this one is still set for sync group one so now if I save that I turn on my sync and now when I turn the LEDs on notice it does not sync over to this other set of LEDs that's because they're now in different sync groups now depending on the version if you have some old wed controllers around you may still be seeing some of those turn on even though you've set this sync to a different sync group but let me go ahead and put this one over in sync group two as well so I'm going to turn my sync back off turn my power back off now I'll go over the configuration Sy interfaces on this one and I will move this one to send receive for group two and save now if I go back go back over to my original turn sync on hit the power button and now you notice they both come on again so one way you can do this is through the use of sync groups if you really want to make sure you have two or three or just a certain group of controllers sync together then we can go and change the UDP ports I turn these back off turn my sync back off going to go into my configuration my sync interfaces on both of these and notice that there are UDP ports now theoretically you can change the UDP ports and only ones on the same UDP ports will communicate with each other you do have to be a little bit careful with that you might end up selecting a UDP Port that's in use for something else on your network or you might have issues with your router uh blocking certain ports usually you can do everything you need to do with these sync groups couple other things when talking about these sync groups you can can opt to have a controller send only and another one receive only or have one send and receive and the other one just send by default it's going to be send receive both notice that you can also set a controller up to only receive certain values from another controller brightness color and effects so if I only wanted this to receive the colors I could turn these two off and now when this one sends it's only going to send over the color and not the effect or the brightness I can also include SE ments and the bounds of those segments if wanted notice that by default I go back to this original here I've only been turning the sync on over here notice that the sink is not turned on over there when I hit the power button they both come on and they both go back off again that's by because by default this button only controls the sending not the receiving so for example if I turn this back on notice I can come over here and I can change the color or I could actually go over here and actually change some of the effects on this secondary controller and it doesn't impact the first one but if I go back and I turn the sync on on this controller now it's going to be sending so now we've got both of them sending so now if I change the color over here notice it syns back over to the other one so you have a lot of flexibility in terms of how your multiple controllers are synced together they can send they can receive or they can do both there's one final thing I want to mention here in terms of syncing notice that before when I said even though when this is turned off it will still receive data from any other wed controller on the same grouping where the syn is turned on but you do have the ability to change that I go to my configuration on this one go to my user interface notice I have a button here that says sync button toggles both send and receive so if I select that I save it did find that I actually have to toggle this one time to get it to work but now even though this by default would have synced from over here now when I turn this power off notice it's no longer syncing over to get this sync to actually work for this one now I have to actually turn the sync back on now when I power them on and off they sync together combination of doing that you can actually take your other wed controllers and if you only want them to receive data in terms of a sync you can actually toggle that on and they will only receive data and be controllable from other wed controllers when its sync button is turned on so while there are a lot of different ways that you can interface your controllers together through this sync option there are also a few drawbacks these two are synced together notice when I turn them on they're both running triy white but they're not actually in sync with each other they're not lined up like when we either split the data signal or we were using a single controller and also note that the effect isn't running across all 600 LEDs it's only act Runing within itself that's because we're only sinking across cross color effect and brightness so things like if you're using audio reactive the sound isn't going to be reflected on the remote or the sync controller so while we can sync things like colors and effects and even segments what if we actually want to be able to control remote controllers like they're actually part of the original controller well we can do that through the use of something called virtual LEDs creating virtual LEDs actually allows you to take a remote controller and led install and connect it back to a primary just like it was connected to a second data pin so I'm going to go ahead and turn both of these back off going to go back into our configuration in our LED preferences and I'm going to come down here and I'm going to add a new LED output now in this case I need to change this to DDP RGB for the network again that's going to say my starting LED is 300 just like it would be if I was connecting to a second data pen and the length of this second one is 300 as well and all I've got to do is put in the IP address of the controller I want to connect to a virtual pen in my case the second controller is 202 I'll go ahead and save that and now if I turn this on notice it turned on the full strip because again if I look at my segments I now have one segment that is actually 600 LEDs instead of the original 300 come back over to my effects let's go back down to that try wipe because it's just a good way to see how it works across all of them and now notice as this wipe is going across it's going over to that second controller a set of LED strips so this is now like it's one big display connected to the primary controller even though they are physically separated and not wired together in fact if I go over here to this one and I try to change something notice I get this message that it is receiving data from the other controller now I do have the ability to override this once or override until reboot I do notice that when I did the override it actually turned the power off so now I can turn the power back on again here and once again these are synced all the way across so if I go ahead and I click the override button override once I'm now back to having individual control of this particular LED strip I can go back to the sync by clicking this star in the top corner and again you can see that it's now being treated like like it is a single controller using multiple data pins so again by using virtual LEDs it allows me to take the LEDs from a completely separate display using a separate controller and actually treat it like it's connected to an additional data pin on the primary controller and you can add more than just one additional remote controller again remember that the esp32 technically supports up to 10 but it's recommended you only have a maximum of four data pin so I could actually have three other remote displays of LEDs each with their own controller that I can now treat as one large display using a single primary controller and do note that since that secondary controller is now connected like it's a data pin to this primary controller that means I have the ability to come in here and create additional segments across those displays just like I would if the LEDs were connected directly to this primary controller on a different data pin and if I want to bring these back apart again to be independent controllers I simply come back into my configuration LED preferences I come down here and I remove this second segment from this or second data pin from this now when I go back each of these are now back to being individually controllable by its own controller so that covers some of the basic ways that you can take a single controller and split up your LED display into multiple segments using either single or multiple data pins it also covers situations where you have multiple controllers and you want to join those together through either syncing or through the use of virtual LEDs again all these can be mixed and matched for your particular needs your display and your wiring and of course what I showed aren't the only ways again be sure to check that video description for links to additional information including the official wed website which has a lot more detail but until next time I'd like to say thank you for watching and I hope to see you soon

Channel: ResinChem Tech

Views: 17,020

Keywords: wled segments, wled sync, wled multiple pins, wled multiple controller

Id: HYdouRHfadE

Length: 29min 53sec (1793 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 20 2024