Wiring....are you messy or do you have OCD!

Dez

Fueled by Christmas - Inspired by You!
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Hahaha,

Sorry for the click bait title but this is something that urks me when I look at other people’s displays. Mostly I notice wiring thrown everywhere on the lawn with no attempt made to keep them tidy. My OCD would not allow this .

Share your photos of previous displays you or others have done and let’s see who are the messy ones!
 

AAH

I love blinky lights :)
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Putting many cables together in neat bundles is a recipe for data integrity issues and also potentially for cable overheating.
Pixel currents are often in the dozens of Amps range (a 1000 pixel megatree will be 55A at full load) and having the power cabling for that bundled up with other cabling which is likely to include pixel networks whose data is reasonably susceptible to noise you will likely see noise injected into the data cabling. Separation is a good thing and crossing power over data at 90 degrees is the safest. Tidy is neat but for this application messy is best. My cabling is semi intentionally all over the place and in no place are there tightly bundled cables.
 

Robbo

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as much as I appreciate tidiness, I do appreciate and understand what Alan has said, is there a compromise somewhere Alan?
 

ezellner

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Putting many cables together in neat bundles is a recipe for data integrity issues and also potentially for cable overheating.
Pixel currents are often in the dozens of Amps range (a 1000 pixel megatree will be 55A at full load) and having the power cabling for that bundled up with other cabling which is likely to include pixel networks whose data is reasonably susceptible to noise you will likely see noise injected into the data cabling. Separation is a good thing and crossing power over data at 90 degrees is the safest. Tidy is neat but for this application messy is best. My cabling is semi intentionally all over the place and in no place are there tightly bundled cables.
If power and data are coming from the same point to a different but common end point, how do you arrange the cables to run at 90 degrees to each other?
 

Dez

Fueled by Christmas - Inspired by You!
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Haha. Love it Brad.

Alan I totally understand what your saying but there should be absolutely no reason why power can be run with power and data can be run with data. When I was doing electrical contracting it was normal practice to run all data together. I consider messy to be a cop out for “I don’t care”
 

AAH

I love blinky lights :)
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What is safest generally can't be achieved in practice.
Any separation is going to be beneficial and the longer the cables are parallel to each other in close proximity the worse the issue will be.
I was looking for a thread from @ShellNZ but it looks like her problem may have been solved via chat rather than the forum. In her case she had all of her cables bundled up nice and neatly and she was experiencing flickering of the pixels. It was only after seeing a photo of her nice tidy cable runs that the issue sense. In the cable runs there was the wiring for dozens of dumb RGB mini trees as well as wiring for the pixels. Large step changes in the brightness of large quantities was affecting the pixels. Hopefully Shell sees this thread and still has the video and photos.
 

Mark_M

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Goliath

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I'm as messy as hell. I have had a couple of problematic elements the last couple of years. All of them use the same the same batch of black 2811 strip. I'm very tempted to rebuild everything from scratch. Whilst confident that I can spit further than that black strip can send a reliable signal to the next element, I can't rule out poor manufacture of my signal cables being the cause of my difficulty.
Them thar null pixelly thangs are on the shopping list .......
 

Nuzzy

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I'm as messy as hell. I have had a couple of problematic elements the last couple of years. All of them use the same the same batch of black 2811 strip. I'm very tempted to rebuild everything from scratch. Whilst confident that I can spit further than that black strip can send a reliable signal to the next element, I can't rule out poor manufacture of my signal cables being the cause of my difficulty.
Them thar null pixelly thangs are on the shopping list .......
I couldn’t get my strips to output any data further than a metre from the end of each prop in 2017, was frustrating as hell. I ended up putting each of my 4 spiral trees on its own output from the F16V3 and had to run a full 5 metre strip to go from one window outline to the next (approx 3 metres).

The spiral trees failed on the busiest night of the year in 2017, after the local Christmas carols.

This season I used heaps of Alan’s Pixel buffers after each prop, not one issue for the whole season.

As for messy or neat, I leave it messy behind the scenes but have young kids that like to run through the display so pretty much all of my cables are run along the bottom of fences or underground.
 
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