Controller Best Practices

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Jmsweatt

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Oct 3, 2020
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Newbie question for you all. This is my first year and I plan to start small but I'm trying to be forward looking with my hardware purchases. This year's show will most likely be a pixel tree with a star on top. I was wondering whether it would be better to drive my tree from a dedicated Falcon F4v3 and then expand next year to more controllers for rest of the show, or just go ahead and buy a controller like the F16v3 or F48. Greatly appreciate your advice in advance on this. Thank you.
 
Depends upon how large your pixel tree is and where your plans lead in the next year or two.

My thoughts on the Falcons are: the F48 is mostly for displays spread over a fairly large area. It has no physical outputs and is a distribution device for receivers. The F16 and F4 both have outputs and can be expanded, the F4 being a smaller display version of the F16. If you go to the Falcon web page and click on one of the controller links to navigate to that particular product and scroll down a bit, you will find another link to a 'Specification Sheet' document. There you will find a comparison chart of the controllers; outputs/inputs and such.

I'm still beginning myself and am using a Falcon F4. I'll have slightly more than 2000 pixels hanging from it. The F4 is not as cost effective as the F16 but the F4 allows me to more easily expand my display strategically; to compartmentalize it as it were.
 
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I've gone with the F48 for my first year. The first 2 smart receivers are solely for the megatree. It's 24 strands of 75 pixels. The other 4 receivers are spread across the display. The 150 pixel star on top is running from another receiver.
 
I was also juggling between an F16V3 and an F48. Max run to any item in the yard from the controller is about 15m.

Was able to get that 15m easily using an F16V3 and Alans pixel buffer, via some cheap 3 core security cable. A cheap CRO showed very little deformation of the pulses due to the cable LC, so could probably go further.

Like nightflyer, the F16 will be driving a 24 x100 string tree, split over 4 ports, topped with a star (probably still using an esp for data).

Both the F16 and F48 are great pieces of kit.. the f48 should be able to drive leds a kilometer away with the right cable :)
 
I would pony up for the F16 now over the F4, the F16 can basically drive 48 ports (or is it 32?) of pixels with all the expansion boards, receivers and everything else you can think of attached... it's also a lot easier when starting of if you just have 1 prop connected to 1 port of your controller, when you start daisy chaining props together, adding smart or differential receivers, it gets complicated really quickly. I'm currently running 1 x f16v3 with differential expansion boards, 1 x f16v2r, 1 x kulp 32 port controller, I have a lot of ports because I'm lazy and it's just easier for me, I could power inject a lot more and probably squeeze it all onto a single f16v3 if I really wanted to, but I like to keep it simple.
 
nightflyer00 said:
I've gone with the F48 for my first year. The first 2 smart receivers are solely for the megatree. It's 24 strands of 75 pixels. The other 4 receivers are spread across the display. The 150 pixel star on top is running from another receiver.
Click to expand...
@nightflyer00 - Thanks for the info! I am planning on building a megatree with one or two smart receivers hooked up to a F48. When you had 24 strands of 75 pixels each, did you have to power inject? Also, how many ports & receivers did you use for the whole setup?

I am thinking of having 8 strands of 100 pixels zig zagged so that I get 16 strips of 50 pixels from the top to the bottom in a 180 degree tree. For the 8 strands, thinking of using 4 ports each from two smart receivers hooked up to the F48. Do you see any issues with this setup?

For this setup, instead of the above, can I use one smart receiver and have the 16 strands of 50 pixels driven in any other configuration? like 4 strands of 200 pixels zig zagged and hooked to the 4 ports of a single smart receiver? In that case, I might need to power inject, right?
 
Hi @roshanv123 i did a 32 strand 60 pixel tree this year of 1 receiver so thats 480 per port plus an extra 50 for my star on the last port.
Although it is powered for 100% I only run at 30% so i power inject at pixels 1 - 241 - 480. This is a 12V tree so if you are going 5V
I would consider injecting at every 100 to be safe and that way your injection points would be closer to the power source.
Also i never power from the controller or receivers but that's a personal choice
 
Thank you @Adsy for all the info! This gives me a pretty good idea on what to do.. I will just use one smart receiver and have 200 pixels per port then.. I will play around with the brightness and see if I can get it to work without power injection.. hoping to be able to get the smart receiver itself to power it if I set it to 30%.. And will do the star on the last port as well.. Will share the experience here..
 
Personally I would go the F16 route. I'm not a fan of the F48. If you want to keep things really simple you can buy an F16 and expansion board and use one port per string with no power injection. I used to run 6 outputs on my tree with 880 pixels each. Problem is when you get a bad pixel you have total chaos or darkness on a large portion of the tree. I swapped over to an F16v3 and two expansions a couple years ago. Seems like a much better idea to me. 48 ports of 110 pixels with no power injection.
 
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