A Corrugated corruption conundrum

logandc99

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I have a question regarding corrugated iron roofs.
So I had my twenty WS2811 stars (from Ray) hooked up to 19m of WS2811 strip light connected to one of my P2s setup in the garage and all worked nicely.
Then I transferred everything up onto the roof, got everything in place and turned on the P2 in test mode to behold my roof lit up in glorious led colour. Instead, my 20 stars lit up and only three leds on the next strip flickered away sickly with the rest of the strips dark. I was injection power left, right and centre so wasn't sure what was going on. Now admittedly I had 6m of 3 core cable going from the stars to the first strip light so my thought was, data problem (even though I had happily gotten away with 6m cables last year although that was down on the ground). I bridged the gap between the stars and the first strip by hooking in another 5m strip and low and behold, the roof was aglow in glorious light. So then I connected 3m of three core cable (tried two different ones) from the stars to the 5m strip and the roof was flashing like a crazy disco.
So it would seem that I am not even able to use 3m of three core cable bridging gaps between lights as the data seems to get corrupted very easily.
3m cables used last year down on the ground never caused and issue so my question is.... would the fact that I am on a corrugated iron roof be the reason why I cannot use even 3m of cable between the strips due to the metal roof causing interference or is that just a crazy notion?
 

fasteddy

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Its not crazy at all

The big issue with pixels is that you can test on the bench and get good results, but then when you install it you may get very different results. I myself have suffered from this.

The cable can act like an antenna and being on a corragated roof may be amplifying this, the fact that by adding a dummy pixel you saw a difference may mean you need to add more

The other thing to try is to lower the speed of the P2, what is your current speed, i would start at 1000 (if 2811) and then jump up in increments of 500 and then fine tune from there.
 

logandc99

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Thanks for that. I will try varying the speed. At present the P2 is set at 2800 so I may be way to high. I wondered whether putting the cable on something so it wasn't directly sitting on the metal might help also.
 

AAH

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Crazy is suggesting 1000 for 2811. 3200 is the designed spec so you should fiddle plus or minus from that value. 2801 you can happily run down to 1000 depending on pixel string length and refresh rate.

Fasteddy said:
Its not crazy at all

The big issue with pixels is that you can test on the bench and get good results, but then when you install it you may get very different results. I myself have suffered from this.

The cable can act like an antenna and being on a corragated roof may be amplifying this, the fact that by adding a dummy pixel you saw a difference may mean you need to add more

The other thing to try is to lower the speed of the P2, what is your current speed, i would start at 1000 (if 2811) and then jump up in increments of 500 and then fine tune from there.
 

fasteddy

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AAH said:
Crazy is suggesting 1000 for 2811. 3200 is the designed spec so you should fiddle plus or minus from that value. 2801 you can happily run down to 1000 depending on pixel string length and refresh rate.

Fasteddy said:
Its not crazy at all

The big issue with pixels is that you can test on the bench and get good results, but then when you install it you may get very different results. I myself have suffered from this.

The cable can act like an antenna and being on a corragated roof may be amplifying this, the fact that by adding a dummy pixel you saw a difference may mean you need to add more

The other thing to try is to lower the speed of the P2, what is your current speed, i would start at 1000 (if 2811) and then jump up in increments of 500 and then fine tune from there.

Not true Alan because I talk from experience and not from theory, my tree has 10 metre cables and I found the sweet spot between 1000 and 1700 any lower and it would freeze and any higher it would flicker
So it may appear to be crazy suggesting this but it has worked in the real world using a speed of 1000 on 2811 so its easy to try and eliminate this as the cause. i must admit 1000 is the extreme, but it worked.
 

BundyRoy

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What exactly does this speed setting do. Do all controllers have it. I can't remember seeing/setting it on my pixlite 16.
 

fasteddy

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BundyRoy said:
What exactly does this speed setting do. Do all controllers have it. I can't remember seeing/setting it on my pixlite 16.

No not all controllers have this feature, the main reason this feature is available was mainly because of the earlier versions of j1sys controllers that shared outputs, the R in P12R means round robin because the controller output would be shared over 3 or 4 outputs (cant remember how many) so this was a way to tweek the data speed to get maximum length between the controller and lights
 

SmartAlecLights

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i refuse to put strip on the corrugated iron roof after last year..
im still repairing it, due to lots an lots of dry joints..
remember the temp might be 40deg but the roof could be 65deg on the iron roof.
 

logandc99

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Rearranged the lights on the roof and managed to eliminate the problem. Now just one more set of stars to go up there and the roof is done.
But man those lights are bright!
uva9ajy2.jpg
 

ShellNZ

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Lookin good logan!

I had a string last year that was 1750, I cant remember what it is this year but I think its back to the normal 2400 as I rewired the whole house outline to properly utilize the output/universe.
 

BundyRoy

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The solar lights on the garden edge are feeling a bit underdone and out of the loop I think Logan. Just lost their title of king of the castle.

Looks great. The stars are really effective. I reckon a run of them across your aerial would look great too.
 

logandc99

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BundyRoy said:
The solar lights on the garden edge are feeling a bit underdone and out of the loop I think Logan. Just lost their title of king of the castle.

Looks great. The stars are really effective. I reckon a run of them across your aerial would look great too.

Fortunately the solars are the ones that I can flick a switch on and they go multicoloured so they still get to play with the big lights at Xmas. [emoji3]
 

logandc99

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So managed to sort out the roof issues ( mostly) and managed a successful test of some of the lights setup so far. Still a long way to go. There is the rest of the house and the whole front part of the section to go. So much to do.... so little time [emoji33]
 

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mborg10

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So did you end up figuring out what to do at the end of your stars Logan. I have been trying to figure mine out all day. I have 4 candy canes then 94 stars then another 4 candy canes. Between then end of the stars and the star of the second lot of candy canes is 5m of cable. I injected power at both ends, still nothing, so I added a pixel in the middle of the 5m run and well a disco happened. I have replaced my cable twice in case that was it and played all around the speed in the P2 but nothing. Is it possible I need 2 pixels in that 5m cable run???


If I had hair it would all be pulled out right now.
 

logandc99

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I rearranged things initially so the stars went separately off the other output of the P2 thereby eliminating the cable from the end of the stars to the strip. However, tonight I connected the end cable of the last star to the beginning of another 5m strip (running along the carport gutter) but there is only about 0.5m of cable between the star and strip. The strips mostly light ok with power injection at the end of he strip but I noticed the first half meter of the strip flickering irratically ( part closest to the last star) whilst the last 4.5m is steady. So I also have reintroduced a problem. Thought it might be the roof interfering again with the connection between the star and strip but not sure if that makes sense as the length of cable between each star is the same as from the star to the strip.
 
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