Thanks for all the great answers, folks! Really worthy, interesting and appreciated. In short, just a few notes -
@pixie you found the prior discussion of nets Nets Awesome!, and from the pics there I now see that bullets can be co-parallel with the wiring. Some tasty looking translucent shell (cubeoctahedron or higher poly shape perhaps?) might spice it up. @jeff 's reference to 10 x 30 nets from Ali Express Ali Express 300 LED Net shows them now at $240 including shipping. Worthy of consideration, but not “cheap” either. At the bottom of that listing page are several interesting arrays and net-like arrangements including Net-like Array and LED Array on Translucent Film.. This latter much like @gmcmicken filmed array Fairy Light Matrix on Clear Sheet, but his is better!
@gmcmicken, your matrix on a sheet is just really great. I love the whole approach… diffusion, effectively strain-relieving the strings, hot melt to clear sheet yielding wide angle viewing… that vinyl sheet though, did you see any puckering or melt behavior there? Could you reveal what type of sheet you used?
Finally, my fairly elementary observations about bottlenecks and such is that watching framerate behavior real-time is a great teacher and reality check for any given pattern/system combo. Multiple PBs and expansion boards can do a lot! Its not so difficult to wire this stuff up, as long as atention is paid to volts drop, and grounding grounding grounding That is IMO. Also there’s the alternative of running things from @zranger1’s ExpanderVerse, which opens up, well, yet another Verse.
ANd @Pixie thanks for running down the different Fairy Light strings. I have been running two types BrizLabs 200 LEd Fixed Address Strings and those 3-wire strings, where the data line hops back and forth. The former have much heavier wire then the latter. The 200 light strings seem to run fine without power injection, though there is some brightness drop.
Well first I looked on amazon for vinyl sheets and the reviews were all terrible so I had my wife look at the fabric store in town while she was there for something else. She said they had two thicknesses and bought me the thinner one. I almost guarantee this one (6mil?) from the fabric store is 10x better than the ones on amazon. It’s advertised to cover furniture, tables, etc. It did not melt, I didn’t have to be careful, and it didn’t pucker much at all. Though the glue is permanently bonded to the vinyl there’s absolutely no way to scrape it off now.
Thanks for the crystal clear clarification…I just went and check and I have versions of all of them, including 3 wire ones which I now suspect have fixed addresses.
Caveat emptor. It looks like each string might be run in parallel. In the video they are mostly doing the same thing on each string. There’s a little color variation but I suspect that might be incidental.
There’s also some minor flickering/glitches in the video, and complaints about that in the reviews. Reviews also mention setting the controller to 30 LEDs to get things to work.
On the other hand, if these do speak ws2812 you could hack them into separate strings by the connector and run them to a splitter to get things fully addressable.
For anyone interested, I had ordered these, and they are in parallel. It definitely would be easy to make them into a zig zag as suggested by connecting them at the bottom and cutting the top connection, but I haven’t tried yet.
Okay so I ordered these which are almost exactly like the ones linked above. The power/controller, the wire, the led size/shape/construction all look identical except for the shape of the junction boxes (with hooks) for each drop.
Anyway - the million dollar question - how are they wired and what protocol do they use. I’m happy to report they are all wires in series with a “return wire” running from the end of each drop back up to the top to continue onto the next drop. Despite 4 wires from the USB, one is not connected. So it is 3-wire, WS2812-like protocol with GRB order.
Can you simply chop off the controller and run it direct from a pixelblaze - yes you can.
Good detective work; thanks for the report. Is the return wire a single conductor? That would make the power and ground to each string run in parallel, but with the signal line returned, it wires the data in a zigzag serial fashion That would account for the fourth conductor in the string plus cleverly shortening the overall length of the power line and reducing the voltage drop. They are effectively injecting power into a serial string at the top of every drop.
I ordered 2 of these on Jan 2
It arrived to Dallas, US on Jan13
Now who know where this package is.
Original delivery date suppose to be on Feb 16 (still 2+ weeks away).
But since package is already in Dallas, US more than 2 weeks it could be lost.
Let me see.
UPDATE
Finally package arrived yesterday.
It took the entire month for package to travel from
Dallas, TX to Orlando, FL
This was my very first attempt to order something
from the Aliexpress.
And this will be my very last attempt as well.
For the quick test I did not bother to setup all that USB + Bluetooth App.
S0, I cut off the USB Controller/Controller and connected the Addressable Net
directly to the Pixelblaze.
Good news is - the Net is true serially connected top-to-bottom, left-to-right,
no zigzagging.
Bad news is - all White definitely requires power injection at the end and
and maybe even in the middle. Picture of what should be all White clearly
shows it is not. The end of the Net is Red. Color degradation stars about
1/3 from the beginning. (Picture is attached.)
I ordered some of these on Jan 31. The order was shipped on the 9th of January and received at my place on Feb 23. So, about three weeks from order to receipt. China to Reno, NV. Not too bad.
Now, to see what can be done with them!
Note: There are 21 pixels per drop and the last pixel is mute, doesn’t light. Total then of working pixels for each net is 400 LEDs.
