Gday everyone, need some help! awesome forum and page. Got me keen to learn light shows.

[Scottpaton22]

I have two young daughters and want to start lighting the house up haha. Question,
This year I have around 8 strands of lights I want to try and sync with music for a super basic project. I have a pi 3b+ and a 8 channel relay board. It’s 12v and has its own power supply as does the pi.
the gpio and relays I have marked accordingly. For the life of me though I can’t seem to trigger anything when it comes to coding. I have no idea what I’m doing there. Tried fpp and vixen single element and also set outputs in fpp to each channel. Still nothing when a sequence plays. Is there an easy way to check the relays are working? Maybe back in code in Pi operating system?

 

[AAH]

Welcome to ACL
You may not be able to post images directly to the forum until you hit a few more posts but it would be handy to see what your setup is in FPP and Xlights (rather than Vixen). Can you also link the relay board as well so that we can check to see if the inputs to it are compatible with the 3.3V logic that comes out of the Pi.

 

[Scottpaton22]

Thanks for a quick reply mate. I have a songle 8 channel 12v board at the minute, (what jay car recommends) but honestly I think it’s half my issue. I think I may buy a new board today like this one in a 8 or 16 as I think there are 16 gpio pins available on the 3b+. Then I can run 2x 5v inputs from the pi and also a 5v30amp power supply directly to the board. (The 16 relay has 2 5v for the pi and another seperate supply on its own) if this is ok I’ll order it today. Just thought I’d show someone before I buy the wrong one again. (99% of videos I see on YouTube use 5v boards not 12v).
Also is 5v 30amp ok to run the board? I think the more amps will help drive it with multiple lights running?

I’ll grab some videos of my fpp outputs. Honestly I have no idea how to setup the outputs, so far I have gone into outputs, other and gone to gpio. Clicked active on each pin out in relay order. (I’ll get a pic of this when I get home again tonight) I did read years ago about a .sh command going somewhere but since the new version of fpp I can’t see where you used to enter the high/low .sh command.
As from what I have read all you do is do the output like I have now and then schedule it? Again no idea have tried some googling haha.

As far as x lights goes I enjoy using it more than vixen. But what do I use to trigger the gpio pins for standard 240v lights? As most are special pixels ect which I will get next year once I know I can make it work in a basic setup. Then I can dive into controllers ect.

All your help is much appreciated. The wiring for me is the easy part, also the actual sequence and timing is no issues it’s just the comms and coding I’m stuck at...

Thanks again and will get pics tonight

 

[CargoLights]

I used to use Vixen for this, and I just set the outputs to on or off. When I first started using xLights, I just created a channel block for the 16 relays I had set up, and only used on and off for them. I was running a USB signal from a Pi to an arduino that actually fired the relays, though (arduino is 5V vs the Pi's 3.5v). I only ran those in testing before I abandoned AC lights and just bought a bunch more pixels, but I know it worked that way in testing. As AAH mentioned, 3.5v won't trigger a lot of relays, so that could be your issue. Otherwise, you have to remember that you can only use on and off effects and you have to treat each strand as a single output.