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[on:]

Hi, I'm planning on building an installation to cover a wall roughly 4mx3m. My original plan was to buy lots of piranha LEDs soldered onto pcbs and tiled onto a wall. These woud then act as a huge low-res display, each LED working as a pixel.

Having usefully discovered (from this forum!) that even a 72x24 res display (1728 leds) wouldn't be possible to build myself using Arduino or any other technologies I must revise my plan:

My idea now is to use much fewer lights (20x10 res so 200 in total). The area is quite well lit and so I would place the lights within light boxes to make the 'pixels' distinct.


So, my questions are:

-What would be the best kind of lights to do this?
-Is there a mains-powered alternative I could control from Arduino or other technology?

Thanks for any advice
Alistair

[Reply #1 on:]

Google for 'shiftbrites' or 'octobar'.

[Reply #2 on:]

You can run a 72x24 res display using Arduino and/or other technologies but may not need to - that is pretty huge.  Someone was talking about the power it takes to run 2000 LEDs.  Just so you know, you can power 2000 standard/5050 RGBs with 600 watts of power supply (DC naturally).  It may take more than one arduino, but controlling 2000 is not out of range for an Arduino or similar solution.  I don't think you need to scale down to 200 LEDs for the entire project but that may be a good place to start.

Also - as far as brighter than Paranha RGBs - not sure you need to go there.  If this is for inside .. the standard / 5050 LEDs are super bright already.

I had a sample video of my living room with a LED lighting setup but used a song they didn't like so the sound was cut and I removed it.    I'll post another video when I can.

[Reply #3 on:]

Sounds like Piranha will be bright enough and that an Arduino solution is possible so this is great news. I want to avoid duplication so won;t go into any further detail on the project in this thread, further details here:

http://arduino.cc/forum/index.php/topic,67342.0.html

As marklar knows, would be good to see yr video,
Cheers!
Alistair

[Reply #4 on:]

If you want the ultimate, these are the most powerful RGB LEDs I've found so far:

http://www.dealextreme.com/p/30w-1500-lumen-rgb-led-emitter-metal-plate-39960