MultiString Outdoor Project Suggestions

I’ve been playing with my first Pixel Blaze for a couple weeks now and its pretty damn awesome. I have my first setup underneath my handrail for my stairs in my house. I’ve been using a strip of dumb lights for years and it’s so much more fun now.

I’m starting to get ideas for other places fpr LED strips and I’m thinking of an outdoor setup.
Essentially, running a 5m strip vertically up four different trees located on the perimeter of my back yard. The PB with sensor board for audio would be housed in the laundry room free from weather elements. I haven’t tried multi string projects yet and was thinking this would be fun. Any suggestions for best practices for wiring these and/or programming patterns? I’m thinking its pretty much just a 2D array.


Behold my MS Paint skills

So the biggest problem is that each of those is quite a run. 4 different strands would be much easier.
You could map each or even map them into a single 2D map together.

With the four different strands, will I need the port expander or is there a better way to wire them? If so, can I use the sensor board and the port expander in the same build?

So that’s the problem: at that distance, I don’t recommend using one controller. Too far. You’d be better with 4 independent controllers.

Right now, we don’t have a way to “share” the sensors like that. But @wizard has hinted at possible future development that might, but now, no.

So if you want music to be sensed by one, and all of them light up, not easily done (yet).

@zranger1 wrote a pattern that makes PBs into e1.31 listeners, so you could use something like LedFX, for example, to control them all, but really and ideally we need a way for PBs to send data out… Hopefully coming in a future firmware.

The problem with running them all on one output expander is almost entirely distance related. There are ways to do it, but I guarantee it’ll be the hardest part of the setup.

Thanks. This is good info. Is there a good rule of thumb for distance between the controller and the LEDs?
The strip I’m using on my stairs has ~30’ of cable running it and no apparent issues. The cables for the outdoor project would likely be something like 70’-100’ if I were to do individual runs back to the controller.

These are the strips I am looking at. 300leds per strip. Four strips in total for the project.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B079ZTBCPH

I don’t have first-hand experience with the point where lengths start to go bad, but a few of us do - I think the easiest way to guide you to those answers is to search the forums for the word “differential”. The ones mentioning a “differential signal” or “differential transceiver” have some wisdom from experience, and mention various lengths.

Awesome. I’ll continue my research.