I want to take a group of short LED strips and connect them in such a way as to make the dripping icicle effect.
The only way I can think of to do this is to put a DMX to LED pixel converter on each icicle and run DMX signals from an Arduino but I don't know anything about DMX right now. Could this work?
If this could work, the second issue is how to physically put it together. The only DMX converters I can find are too large and too expensive for what I want to do.
I found a very old website where someone did this. The DMX converters they used were small and fairly inexpensive but no longer available.
Is there another way to do this? I really want to be able to control each icicle independently.
What sort of LED strips are they ?
Unless you can control each LED separately you will not be able to achieve a dripping effect
If they are WS2812 (or equivalent) LEDs then you can control any sensible number of them, even if they are in different "icicles", using one Arduino pin
Yes, I would be using WS2812 or other addressable LED strips/strings.
However, I'm not sure how I could control each icicle separately. Yes, in theory, it could work but how would I keep the signal intact between icicles? This could work if they are close together but how close would they have to be? My understanding is that the signal degrades over fairly short length of wire. In one scenario I would hang them from the branches of a tree. The distance between icicles could be as much as 10 feet. Is there any way to preserve the signal over such distances? Or would I need to put LEDs along those lengths that would just serve to propagate the signal and stay dark?
how would I keep the signal intact between icicles?
If you can connect them as a single string of LEDs then icicle1 could be LEDs 0 to 10, icicle2 LEDs 11 to 20, etc.
As to connecting several LED strings in series as far apart as 10 feet then this is no different than if you use different Arduino pins to control each icicle. There must be advice available on line as to the maximum distance between LEDs in such strings but I have never needed to look
One important factor is supplying power to each icicle however they are wired. The usual advice is to supply power to both ends of long LED strings and possibly to intermediate points as well in order to provide the current required