I have equipped a floor lamp for my living room with SK6812 RGBW 144 LED/m recently.
The reasons for this choice are:
- High density: adressable effects look smoother
- W: white LED allow me to use it as a normal lamp to lighten my living room properly (higher CRI than only RGB set to white)
However I run in some problems:
- 5V only = high temperature: this adressable density with white LED can only be found in 5V format, which means over 5A per cable (i have very limited space). A workaround would be to use these new COB 24V RGBW, but it means the adressable segments are 50-80mm long depending of supplier, which destroys the “smoothness” of animations like “Fireflies”, “KITT” or anything with movement. Same for non COB strips, i can find 12V or 24V RGBW but with 60 led/m max
- Max luminosity at full white: it is simply nowhere as bright as “normal” white LED strips, even in 144 led/m
- I have doubts about the actual CRI with white LED in this 5050 format
Since I don’t need the high CRI “white” mode to be adressable (it’s used only in static mode, and I can accept white RGB for “effects”), i was thinking of running a CCT strip instead of only white strip next to a classic RGB SPI strip.
But how to control the CCT strip ? Can i use a converter “digital to analogue” ? The ones i’ve found seems to convert SPI to RGBW at best (considering it as “one pixel”), but i haven’t found data for CCT control. Can I for example connect NW and WW of the CCT to R and G for example and send a pixel like this from the Pixelblaze ?
I might be looking at something difficult… I found some 2805 RGBCCT led strips allowing all at once, but none of them go above 60 LED/m, which is far from enough: i’d need double at least.
Should I simply abandon and go with the SK6812 RGBW even though I have to deal with 5V ?
Thank you