Hi All,
Super new here.
I’m building Fluroescent tube replacements out of some 6812’s and using Pixelblaze to be the brains of the operation.
It’ll mostly be for static light, but I was wondering what you guys would reccomend as far as when I do use some patterns:
Should I loop the LED strips so it’s say LED 1 - 150 in one long loop?
– OR –
Would it make more sense to splice the data out from PB so that each twinned strip recieves the same instructions?
Can I even do that?
Thx.
Hi There,
Please take care if you are intending to use RGB (~30lm/W) as general lighting as RGB is very low efficiency <30lm/W and therefore low lumen output when compared to white LEDs at >120lm/W (and fluorescent ~75lm/W).
Please consider RGBW or even better WWW digital LEDs if you are have to achieve a good lux level for static general lighting.
best regards
Sounds like you want to do 150 lights in two rows (75 in each?)
Yes, as 6812s are ws2812 clones, you can just fork the data line and do two parallel strips, but you give up so much potential doing that. You are halving the number of effective LEDs for effects for the sole benefit of easier wiring and doubled light output without any extra code.
You can easily add a bit of code to make two pixels light up the same, and yet still retain the ability for them to be different at times too. The map is trivial and the benefits of full individual led control are worthwhile, so IMHO, don’t fork it.
I also recommend RGBW if possible, you’ll be way way happier with the white light then.
Do take some photos.
Thanks! I did indeed buy some RGBW’s to make sure I get better lighting.
I didn’t look into WWW digital LED’s though. Would they be better for lighting I take it?
Thanks!
I figured as much thinking about it after I posted. It’s funny, I work on computers professionally, but I am garbage when it comes to coding, so i’ll probably post a few more questions soon.
Here is an imgur album of what a VERY ROUGH test light looks like.
Go read Quindor’s take on CRI.
With that much space to use, you might want to wire up some good white LEDs too, and then just have software control which light up. I don’t think you’ll need an expander board unless you mix types (which might make shopping/life easier ) you should be able to wire it all to the PB. Then you can tweak patterns to either use color or white (or mixed) sections of the whole light. So you might have some better CRI lights for “actual light” and then RGBWs for the fun stuff…
In my personal experience with CRI, I’ve had a hard time correctly identifying 85 vs “95+” vs 98 CRI strips in a single-blinded 10-trial test. I was comparing CCW (tunable color temperature) strips from Amazon (85) vs some from SuperBrightLED (95) vs Yuji (98). The cost per lumen varied over 20X from worst to best.
When unblinded and we knew which were supposedly better, we convinced ourselves we could spot a difference, but only at the higher color temperatures. At 2700K, you’re already intentionally attenuating the problematic blue spike so much, it doesn’t seem to matter.
Caveats:
Everyone’s perceptual acuity is different - you should test yourself. That said, my wife couldn’t reliably identify the higher CRI either.
Our tests were in two low-stakes environments: a home office and my garage. We had some artwork and a large set of colored pencils to evaluate under each.
