Hello! Part of my display - might be an easy question

twohons

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Sep 9, 2024
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I'm looking at making part of my display wireless, as its going to be moved around. What I have in mind is a set of pixels not too different from https://auschristmaslighting.com/threads/seed-pixel-matrix-using-bunnings-sheet.16224/
... on a smaller scale. The idea is that I set up my light matrix hooked to something like an ESP32 (and power) or suchlike, which is controlled wirelessly, I suppose WiFi or Bluetooth, from say a raspberry pi running Falcon.
What's the expert's opinion, apart from a distrust of going wireless because of the potential of losing sync with any music?
I'm sure people have done this sort of thing before, how hard would this be to set up? I gather there are circuit diagrams around and some code for talking to a ESP or 82... hooked to lights?

Any tips, hints or feedback welcome! Im in the early days of planning so have flexibility to listen

Many thanks
 
Best way to do this over wifi, would be either use an ESP32 with an SD card that holds your sequence files and recieves timing packets from FPP (Master/Slave mode), or to use a device running FPP (Pi/Beagle board) and connect your controllers/esp32's via ethernet, again using the timing packets with master/slave mode.

Avoid wifi at all costs when sending lighting data, you will hate the results if you do.
 
So WLED and espixelstick exist. (Especially the latter with its support for FPP remote mode with a SD card). Look to those for your software Side.

Are you really looking at 80 wireless controllers? What are you trying to achieve?
 
80 devices on a single wifi network in close proximity will require some careful design work on the wireless side, especially at 2.4GHz, in order to get the performance you'd need.
I'd say away from using consumer equipment for this, as you'd have alot less control on the RF side for setting things like max clients per radio, handoff, channel optimisation etc.
 
As a small part of my future display I hope to have a flat matrix of lights which I can move if I need to without wires hanging off it - displaying christmas images, messages and so forth with no attempt to sync any movement to music. I'm thinking about 128x128 or so. Of course, I could also procure a surplus old TV and waterproof it, I just don't think that would be very robust past its first season - and lights look better. If I could feed it data for different images via WiFi it would give me flexability, but again don't imagine I'll sync it with anything.
 
So one thing to watch out for is that matrix resolution sizes turn into really large numbers of individual lights. A 128x128 matrix would be 16,000 pixels. You *could* control that - but probably not with a single ESP32. You likely don't need that level of detail (and if you do -- an old TV or a projector is probably the way). (for reference - my garage matrix (there's some videos on my profile) is a 32 high, 48 wide. You can certainly do higher definition that that (I use the matrix for patterns, not videos) - but 128x128 is a real challenge to just do in lights.
 
For a matrix 128x128, I'd look at using something like P10 panels. They come in 32x16 resolution, so you'd need 4 panels wide and 8 panels high- driven from a colorlight card. The total size would be 1.28m x 1.28m
 
People have good stand-alone control options for P10 panels too, so it makes good sense. Probably less frustration and cheaper than pixels, though not as easy as the projector idea. You could sync it to something later if you change your mind.
 
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