I've searched and read a ton about LED's an arduino on these forums, but there's a few questions I can't seem to get answered....
I've got a tray ceiling (20' x 35') and I wanted to light with LED's. 90% of our house has straight white 3500k led accent lighting everywhere (cabinets, counters, toe-kicks, etc). Trying to keep it clean and minimal.
The living room has a large tray ceiling that I want to light white most of the time, but everynow and then go with designs or colors based on parties, holidays, etc etc.
For this reason, I'm leaning towards 5v SK6812. I've got 4 outlets at each corner in the tray ceiling, so power injection and running wires isn't a problem.
Here's my confusion:
Is an arduino enough to manage that many LED's? Nano? Mega? Do I need a different controller?
If I do the math, it's about 110 feet of LED's, and at 60LED/ft, I'm looking at about 6600 give or take 100.
In an ideal world, I want to use something like WLED, but what works on Arduino? Or should I drop the arduino and go to one of the WLED supported boards?
I read this article (Help with WLED and Arduino - #2 by Paul_B) and kinda got lost. Do I need the arduino + ESP to program it? Do I need to have the arduino there to actually run it? Can the ESP handle 6600 pixels?
I have a feeling I'm looking at this wrong, but I don't really know which path to even start on
Each led take 3 bytes, so the 6600 leds required about 20K memory buffer, Arduino Nano has 2K, Arduino Mega - 8K
The second problem is response speed. The addressable leds are quite slow, reaction time is proportional to the number of leds. For dynamic effects, you need at least 20-30 fps, this is achievable only with a strip of no more than 1000 leds. Longer strips need to be cut into parts and updated in parallel, which is available only to powerful controllers such as Due and Tensy
Each led take 3 bytes, so the 6600 leds required about 20K memory buffer, Arduino Nano has 2K, Arduino Mega - 8K
sounds like even if I drop to 30 LED/ft, still won't work with the Mega? no point in loosing "resolution then"
I also assume you mean Teensy? I can't seem to find anything on Due. Is another option the ESP8266? I know that takes me out of this forum, but based on this article, sounds like it will support the LED count if I do four/five parallel runs?
Based on the same article the esp8266 can drive not more than 3 strips with 512 leds each. And esp8266 is "strongly non recommended", as said the authors
another reason to use WLED is that I would like to control the lights from an app, so i guess my use case is guiding me to some very specific hardware.
This note about the buffer size and how many LED's can be controlled gives me a good path to follow.
Any advice on better ideas or routes to take? Desired end goal: white accent lights in a tray ceiling with an option to put on a light show occasionally via app control.
Teensy, Due and ESP boards are 3.3volt logic.
You need a 3.3volt to 5volt logic converter between board and the first LED.
Powering a 5volt strip (individual control) could be a challenge (60mA per LED).
If you can live with controlling LEDs in sets of three, then a 12volt LED strip is an option (60mA per 3LEDs). If you can live with control in sets of six, then a 24volt LED strip could be an option (60mA per 6LEDs).
Leo..
