Recent content by Iain

We were talking about a potential Darwin mini coinciding with the Sydney mini so we could zoom in to your talks…

There’s a few ways of doing it. You can buy COB LEDs which are designed for 120/240V AC and also those designed for 12/24/36 etc V DC. The DC ones need a driver. You can buy a “constant current” driver (or build, but I never understood them well enough) or a constant voltage driver. I bought a 4...

I wanted to integrate my pool lights so I tried some iterations of cheap COB LEDs from Ali, but I ended up with $10 Crees from element14. There’s some more here.

Haha different skills—building/making/installing props is much more time consuming for me. I’m down to one night for a simple song sequence, to the point my family can’t tell if it’s a pro one or not. I can tell, but we’re our own worst critics!

What’s the difference between those small 10 W ones facing the camera and the large black one facing the road?

Interesting on the 24V supply-I do want to get some more for my thick foliage fence so this would help… I had to make sure mine were not dimmed like the rest of my display and then the brightness was ok. I meant to reply to this bit! I’d be interested in some sort of ground stake for them…

Building hardware takes me a long time (literally months using every spare Saturday and many nights) and I can’t do the same again next year. I’m going to have to do much more mid year or none at all… I had maybe 10 failures out of 2500 pixels and that will put me off too if I end up replacing...

Not as far as I know. They’re two separate styles of lighting. Typically a three wire connection per string from a suitable board. One wire being the “data”, the other two are positive & negative. Be careful with the cable thickness depending on your chosen voltage and distance, as they draw a...

From his website, Alan writes “Lights in the range from about 27V-36V can generally all be ran from a 31V power supply” so that ready to run box should suit all of your lights. For sending signals to the DMX2-24, you will still need something such as a laptop, or raspberry pi, and appropriate...

Yeah was referring to asking the Chinese manufacturers. I know you only have their word, but it doesn’t hurt to ask, especially if you’re ordering the bulk buy.

I wonder if “we” can get some assurances of better quality in the next bulk buy… better epoxy or better soldering or something?

I use both Aus and AliExpress. A few of the Aussie suppliers are very helpful around crunch time, which is when deliveries from China slow down, because of the volume of postage around Christmas. You have to beware of cheap rubbish on Ali as well—some of those renderings look much nicer than the...

Take the opportunity (while all the displays are up) to try and find a nearby forum member who could give you 5 minutes behind the scenes. We can all see the lights, but sometimes seeing inside the control box or the wiring gives you so much more of an idea.

Fusing it is probably your best bet. It probably comes with wires to match the max output of the strings it was sold for. It may look fine when the effects are doing their thing, but if something caused them all to go white (it happens) you may end up with some melting cables. It wouldn't be too...

Hi and welcome! That's a nice bright display. Do you want to completely replace it with pixels, or mix both together? Now is the time to go visiting and see how different people put their displays together. Have a look at the display locations, let us know what suburb you're in, and there's...