GS8208 Pixel – Trusted Suppliers?

[nz_monkey]

Hey There,

I am looking at buying around 1000 pixels worth of GS8208 bullet style pixels.

I was planning on buying them from Ray Wu, but have seen various reports on this forum that his WS2811 bullet pixels were unreliable last year.

I was wondering what people's experience is with Ray's GS8208 pixels ? and would you trust Ray as a supplier for these ?

also, are there any other recommended suppliers for the GS8208 pixels ?



Thanks !

 

[orchidman33]

I am currently using 2000 GS8208 12V pixels

40.07AU $ |Dc12v Gs8208(similar To Ws2811/ucs1903) Addressable Pixel;ip68 Rated;one Bad Node Does Not Affect The Other Nodes'working - Lighting Strings - AliExpress

Smarter Shopping, Better Living! Aliexpress.com

www.aliexpress.com

and like what I am seeing.
I have ordered this time

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/100...o.order_list.order_list_main.5.21ef1802POp7bE

as I can get them freight free via DHLand are due in about two weeks.

 

[Skymaster]

I believe @Kent got his from Shiji last year, as did @BooY

 

[thewanderingpine]

Pinging @Jase since I know you’re interested.

 

[ryanschristmaslights]

For GS8208 strings, I went with a new supplier Shenzhen Shiji Lighting on Alibaba. I am not aware of them having an AliExpress store. I posted a whole thread about the journey of finding, ordering and using them below:

GS8208 12V pixel strings - A wildcard third option for the 5V vs 12V WS2811 question?

'5 volt versus 12 volt, which one do I choose?' How many times have you seen someone ask the above question? More than likely they are not sure whether to buy WS2811 5V or 12V RGB pixels. Well how about a third contender, GS8208 12V pixels? Not all 12V is the same, as it turns out! Spoiler...

auschristmaslighting.com

The reason I went with a new supplier for the strings is back in 2021 I found it too difficult to obtain GS8208 strings from the more well-known suppliers, either too high of a minimum order quantity or totally unavailable. So far I am pretty happy with the strings from Shiji, even despite it introducing a different connector style into my show. I have placed follow-up orders with Shiji in 2022 and again 2023. For 2023, a very small number of pixels arrived with the PCB partially exposed due to a lack of waterproofing. When I let the supplier know they offered to remake the affected strings. In all I think it was 3 strings that were affected.

GS8208 is a great 12V pixel string alternative compared to WS2811, in my opinion. Lower peak wattage and built-in gamma correction that results in smoother fades and colour mixing.

@orchidman33, nice to hear that Ray is selling GS8208 bullet pixels now. Out of interest do these have the built-in test mode?

---

For GS8208 strips I purchased these from Ray Wu in 2018 and have not had any problems with them. I have not purchased any further GS8208 strips since 2018. The strip style I use is 30leds/m white PCB in silicon tube, and I have these as window borders and use for leaping arches in air seeder tube.

 

[someoneAUS]

My Shiji bullets I have had 1 failed stuck blue so far. Ordered 7000 tested all... Only have a few 1000 actually in use tho.

 

[Jase]

I've had quotes from Ray and from YPS. Running out of budget for this year but think next year I'll start moving stuff over to them to get better reliability. I had a really, really bad run with 2022 ETOP pixels from Paul (which are still causing me lots of issues this year) but I've left my run a bit late to remedy that. So I'll play pixel whac-a-mole this year and hopefully get 4 wire going next year with less troubles!

 

[merryoncherry]

I feel you on the 2022 ETOPs Jase....

I got some Duo 8208s from YPS. I have not fielded them for long yet, of course, since they just got here... so I can't tell you what you really want to know about the reliability.

I ran a couple candy canes in the Halloween show just to see how they'd do... just under 400 pixels for a few hours a day for a week... ran at 14V (for reasons I will describe in a moment) and they were fine.

My take on the YPS Duos: I really want to like these pixels, but there are some gotchas:
1. Good, consistent epoxy fills.
2. Very thin wire limits the distance between PI points. The YPS claim of 250-300 is incorrect... sometimes 200 (100 from power) is too many. I asked, and they got defensive and bragged that their wire is thicker than every other manufacturer (despite photos to the contrary) and that it's the thickest 4-wire you can put on a pixel (despite the pigtail connected to the first pixel being of much thicker than the wire from that point on). (Thus the interest in turning the PSU voltage up a little.)
3. Occasional flickery pixels. Out of a few thousand, I've found 4 pixels that flicker. One of them, I could make the flickering go away by flexing the pixel, but that was the only one (
View: https://vimeo.com/879540803
), the others could not be flexed into submission.
4. They do self-test when there is no data sent, making all kinds of interesting patterns. This is sort of annoying... after the show stops if I don't shut down the controllers right away, they start doing a mini-show all by themselves. (I guess we all need e-fuses?)

HTH

 

[Jase]

I feel you on the 2022 ETOPs Jase....

I got some Duo 8208s from YPS. I have not fielded them for long yet, of course, since they just got here... so I can't tell you what you really want to know about the reliability.

I ran a couple candy canes in the Halloween show just to see how they'd do... just under 400 pixels for a few hours a day for a week... ran at 14V (for reasons I will describe in a moment) and they were fine.

My take on the YPS Duos: I really want to like these pixels, but there are some gotchas:
1. Good, consistent epoxy fills.
2. Very thin wire limits the distance between PI points. The YPS claim of 250-300 is incorrect... sometimes 200 (100 from power) is too many. I asked, and they got defensive and bragged that their wire is thicker than every other manufacturer (despite photos to the contrary) and that it's the thickest 4-wire you can put on a pixel (despite the pigtail connected to the first pixel being of much thicker than the wire from that point on). (Thus the interest in turning the PSU voltage up a little.)
3. Occasional flickery pixels. Out of a few thousand, I've found 4 pixels that flicker. One of them, I could make the flickering go away by flexing the pixel, but that was the only one (
View: https://vimeo.com/879540803
), the others could not be flexed into submission.
4. They do self-test when there is no data sent, making all kinds of interesting patterns. This is sort of annoying... after the show stops if I don't shut down the controllers right away, they start doing a mini-show all by themselves. (I guess we all need e-fuses?)

HTH

Ohh very interesting information! Do you have any of their new improved ones? I was chatting with John from Ink yesterday and he was saying they've had an extremely low failure on the new YPS 3 wire ones!

 

[merryoncherry]

Ohh very interesting information! Do you have any of their new improved ones? I was chatting with John from Ink yesterday and he was saying they've had an extremely low failure on the new YPS 3 wire ones!

In my scramble to replace a hohohoton of bad 2022 pixels, I got a few of their new+improved ones along with some other brands. The initial quality of all of these pixels was pretty good, but I have at most 3 weeks of Halloween show run time on any of them. Out of ~18k pixels I swapped, 2 were flaky in that interval, both ScottLED, but that was out of ~12k of their pixels used... both of these had an iffy data connection. (2 out of 12k being bad is acceptable to me, I think in QA you can't pick up on some of these intermittent defects, so I sort of expect 1 in 10k to fail in any given year...)

I did install 1400 YPS new pixels in my Rosa Grande, tested it and all pixels were good, but have no additional test results. I can say that the spacing between pixels is not quite as far as it is on PZ, GE, Mattos, etc., but also not as tight as ScottLED or HC (who only advertises it as 3" anyway).

 

[Jase]

In my scramble to replace a hohohoton of bad 2022 pixels, I got a few of their new+improved ones along with some other brands. The initial quality of all of these pixels was pretty good, but I have at most 3 weeks of Halloween show run time on any of them. Out of ~18k pixels I swapped, 2 were flaky in that interval, both ScottLED, but that was out of ~12k of their pixels used... both of these had an iffy data connection. (2 out of 12k being bad is acceptable to me, I think in QA you can't pick up on some of these intermittent defects, so I sort of expect 1 in 10k to fail in any given year...)

I did install 1400 YPS new pixels in my Rosa Grande, tested it and all pixels were good, but have no additional test results. I can say that the spacing between pixels is not quite as far as it is on PZ, GE, Mattos, etc., but also not as tight as ScottLED or HC (who only advertises it as 3" anyway).

Very interesting! Yeah I'll swap mine out next year. Should've done it this year but running low on budget lol.

 

[Iain]

I have all 3000 from ETOP. 2000 from early 2022 which apparently had less failures than later-22, and 1000 from about a month ago.

This is my first year of using them, and so far so good, and I’m praying it stays that way!

I notice the epoxy fill in the squares is inconsistent, with some filled to the brim and some a lower level, so hopefully they all stay watertight for the monsoon!

 

[merryoncherry]

It can be really hard to say. I got, via various distributors, pixels that were supposedly all ETOP, yet there were at least 3 different board designs in the pixels, so it seems hard to know how much reselling goes on... and I feel like some of these people front a lot of smaller factories... the last time I ordered a fair variety of stuff from Ray and I got boxes from 3 different cities in China.

 

[Jase]

I have all 3000 from ETOP. 2000 from early 2022 which apparently had less failures than later-22, and 1000 from about a month ago.

This is my first year of using them, and so far so good, and I’m praying it stays that way!

I notice the epoxy fill in the squares is inconsistent, with some filled to the brim and some a lower level, so hopefully they all stay watertight for the monsoon!

Darwin is def monsoon territory lol!

 

[nz_monkey]

Thank you for all the useful info !

Are you running 50pixel or 100pixel strings ?