Year Round Holiday LEDs Part 1: Hardware

today on the hookup we're gonna take a look at installing individually addressable RGB LEDs on your house as permanent multi holiday lights I'm gonna walk you through my setup and tell you the things that I got right and what I would do differently if I did it all over again last November my neighbors started putting up Christmas lights and much to my dismay he broke our four-year Accord to only put lights on the first floor roof as to minimize our yearly chances of death in response I decided to do the only logical thing and exercise the nuclear option I went online and bought 50 meters of individually addressable RGB LEDs to install permanently on my house my goal was to make a great-looking holiday light setup to leave up all year round to use for more than just Christmas I wanted to be able to write my own custom animations for each holiday and easily add them to my existing setup I also live in a neighborhood where people keep their yards and houses looking nice and I didn't want to piss off my neighbors by having some shoddy looking Christmas lights hanging all year round so it needed to be nearly invisible when not in use the LEDs that I use are ws2812 LED strips I opted for the 5 volt varieties specifically 150 LEDs per 5 meters and the ip65 waterproof kind I could give you an Amazon affiliate link for them but you'd be getting ripped off I highly recommend getting these on eBay or Aliexpress because the prices are significantly lower you should expect to pay somewhere between 15 and 18 dollars per 5 meters strip I was able to get a 5 pack for 12 dollars per strip but it's just a matter of looking around for the good deals I've linked an eBay listing for the type of strip that I recommend which again is 5 volts 150 LEDs per 5 meters ip65 waterproof and here's why I recommend that specific type for this application first let's talk about LED density this is the lowest possible LED density you can get in ws 28 12b strips they're available from 30 LEDs per meter which is the ones I use all the way up to a hundred forty four LEDs per meter you may think that the more LEDs per meter the better but you need to consider the fact that each of these LEDs can draw up to 60 milliamps this means if I have 50 meters of rooftop with 30 LEDs per meter and 60 milliamps per LED that's 90 amps of a power supply that I need just for the LEDs not even accounting for power loss from wire resistance if you quadruple the number of LEDs per meter you'll also need to quadruple the amperage meaning my rooftop LEDs would require a whopping 360 amps at max brightness if your mind is boggling right now at the prospect of pulling 180 or 360 amps through your 15 amp circuit breaker don't forget what's actually important in this case is the amount of power needed which is actually measured in watts watts are calculated by multiplying the amps by the volts so my 15-amp outlet can output 15 amps times 120 volts and that makes 1,800 watts this 60 amp power supply outputs 60 amps at 5 volts which is only 300 Watts that means that if the rest of my circuit is empty and the power conversion was a hundred percent efficient which it absolutely isn't I could theoretically run five of these 60 amp power supplies on a 15 amp 120 volt circuit if you're on 240 you could run ten of them moral of the story if you increase your pixel density you'll also increase the power consumption and these things are already super power-hungry amazon has some great deals on these 5 volts 60 amp power supplies and I've linked the specific one I use down in the description the second consideration when selecting your strips is voltage the downside to a 5 volt strip is there's a greater voltage drop due to the resistance of the traces on the strip this means that you'll need to inject power about every 5 meters to make sure your colors remain accurate no matter what though you're going to need to inject power regardless of the voltage that you use and as long as you're not running full brightness pure white the 5 volt strips will look great injecting power on each end of the strip what ends up being every five meters the downside of the 12-volt LEDs and the reason that I didn't pick them for my project is they don't come in the ws2812 B variety and that variety has the microcontroller right in the middle of the LED chip the WS 2811 chips are fine and you can pick them up for even less money but in my experience the strip's are much less forgiving when it comes to bending them because the large 2811 chip can become disordered really easily if you bend it the last consideration is waterproofing the strips come in three varieties IP 30 IP 65 and IP 67 IP means ingress protection or how well it keeps stuff out of the electronics the first number refers to the protection against solids like dust and the second refers to the protection against water IP 30 has very little protection it's not dust tight and it has zero waterproofing ip65 is covered with a silicon coating that makes it dustproof and waterproof to rain and even spray with a water jet ip67 is enclosed in a silicon tube that sealed on both ends IP 67 means that it's completely dustproof and waterproof up to one meter of immersion that sounds great right there's two reasons the IP 65 is superior to the IP 67 version for this application first the IP 67 tubes are only waterproof if they're properly sealed at both ends and since I'm going to be cutting my strips to be able to bend around corners and roof peaks this means a lot of different areas where I could screw up the seals and ruin my strips the second issue is size I mentioned that I wanted these LEDs to be virtually invisible when they're off to accomplish this I housed everything inside these aluminum channels that come with mounting brackets and a plastic light diffusing cover the ip67 tubes are wider and thicker and so they don't fit inside these aluminum channels as well with the IP 65 version I was able to squeeze the LED strips and the power injection wire into these little channels so it's all out of sight I mentioned that there were some things that I would do differently if I did it all over again first of all you need to make sure that ever strip that you're chaining together comes from the same seller in the same manufacturer there are so many different suppliers for these individually addressable RGB LEDs then I ended up buying mine from three different sellers the problem was that there were all different configurations of RGB in four of my strips they were in the GRB order in five of my strips they were RGB and one of my strips was brg and this meant that if I chain those strips together the colors would change drastically when it got to the new strip luckily I figured this out before I install them on the roof where my programming would have gotten a lot more complicated really fast second don't skimp out on power injection I injected power into both ends of each strip except for the very last strip on the downstairs roof I thought that since it was only about half a strip I'd be able to get away with only injecting power at the beginning of the strip I was wrong my colors get all funky in the last 60 LEDs if I use too much brightness so I have to specifically write my animations accordingly so that it doesn't get weird I run my strips off of a single 60 amp power supply since I never have them all on at pure white 100% brightness at the same time I've got my power supply mounted in the garage with an esp8266 base node MCU controlling them I've wired them up in four separate LED zones first floor roof second floor roof yard LEDs and my LED wreath the roof LEDs stay connected all year long for minor holidays sports games and anything else I feel like turning on and then the two auxilary zones are added for extra features like an LED mega tree for Christmas and a pumpkin wreath for Halloween each zone has its own three core wire running into a continuous strip of LEDs this means that each LED can be addressed individually keep in mind that if you wire your strips in parallel each strip will have a corresponding LED when you call it in the code so instead of turning on LED 10 for instance it will turn on LED 10 in each strip by having your LEDs in different zones each wire to a different pin on your node MCU you can make sure that each light is control individually for the best customization of your patterns the wiring for each zone is concealed within my roofs office and it's only visible in the bottom corner of each roof when the LEDs are off the aluminum channels blend in completely with the drip edge of the roof and the gutters but at night they can do all kinds of crazy animations they can be spooky Halloween eyes with lightning crazy rainbow colors bouncing patterns simple customizable blocked colors or even classic twinkling white Christmas lights this video was about the hardware decisions that I made for my holiday LED lights and why I made them it doesn't necessarily make them the right decision for everyone dr. Zee's for instance uses W s 28 individual pixels instead of strips and he made his own mounting system for them they're both fun and awesome the obvious difference between the two is that the pixels will always look like individual lights while the strip's can accomplish either the individual look or a more continuous color effect holiday LEDs are a super fun way to get more comfortable with electronics and programming they are a non crucial part of your everyday life so you can mess with them as much as you want without having to worry about the wife approval factor as a break from pure home automation videos I'm gonna make the occasional fun video about custom animations and props for different holidays if you've got a specific question about LED hardware that I didn't cover in this video please ask you down in the comments and I'll get back to you as soon as I can if you've enjoyed this video please consider subscribing and as always thanks for watching the hook-up [Music]

Channel: The Hook Up

Views: 222,209

Keywords: home assistant, hassio, home automation, hass.io, smart home, diy, electronics, arduino, esp8266, nodemcu, wemos d1, automation, led, holiday, christmas, lights, ws2812b, rgb, individually addressible, bruh

Id: _UiqrnRiqpk

Length: 10min 43sec (643 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 03 2018