The #ConnectiCOT Sphere!

Hello All! I’m new here, with a jillion questions. I’ve built this 18 foot diameter geosphere in my yard. Now, I’d like for it to be filled with pebble LEDs.

For starters. I’m hoping to add 5,000 WS2811 LEDs in the form of those cool pebble pixel strings. Can a pixelblaze handle that? Ultimately, I want to have about 90,000 LEDs inside the sphere. A ball of lights, so to speak.

Can I make that come true with Pixelblaze tech?

I’d love some feedback and coaching if you might spare the time?

Thanks!

Hey Will!

Check out some of the frames per second estimates on https://electromage.com/pixelblaze. You’ll see that pixelblaze could generate that many off of a single chip but the transmission and computation time is going to be pretty disappointing in terms of final frame rate.

A good rule of thumb is that you can get about 30 frames per second by limiting yourself to 800 LEDs. Plus, wiring any large project is usually gonna be a little bit easier when you can wire in a star to topology and that’s what the output expanders are perfect for. So my recommendation to you for a project like this would be to use between 6 and 10 Pixelblazes in sync mode, and use output expanders to make your wiring easier, as well as shorter so it’s more robust against segment failure.