I just finished my LED display on my house, a bit over 2000 LEDs, 6 channels, longest channel is 600+ pixels, and while I was expecting I would need to re-inject power, I somehow did not.
I measured voltage at the end of my longest channel and it had dipped from 12V to 5V, but the LEDs still seem to be lighting up fine, which is amazing.
From what I read on the WS2818s, they aren’t meant to run from 5V, but they seem to work fine from 5V anyway, which would explain why it just happens to work.
Have others experienced this?
As to how this was “installed”, I got a tip to use hot glue, which with a battery operated hot glue gun, and a battery operated air blower (to cool down the glue in 10s or so, so I could move on to the next point without waiting 1mn for the glue to cool down), hot glue worked fine even if this took 3-4 full days of hot gluing, cabling and a few points where I spliced the cables to split the signal.
End result:
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