Hello

[Copatrick]

Im an electrician from Canada and am looking to install a fairly basic setup on my home. The local companies are charging a fortune for an install which seem fairly straight forward. Im a little confused on the types of lights and compatibility, especially with a Kulp controller as it says you can only run WS2811. Here is what I'm thinking of installing, any suggestions are greatly appreciated.

1. Ray Wu 30mm RGBW UCS2904 string, approximately 36 meters of track, 7 holes per length, approximately 252 pixels in total.
2. Meanwell power supply
3. Kulp controller, possibly a K8-B?

Is there better places to buy lights, track? Will i need power injection with this setup, if split up my main level pixels from the upper level pixels?

Thanks
Dave

 

[AAH]

Welcome to ACL.
There's a whole heap of different pixels that are compatible with the WS281x timing. UCS2904 is likely 1 of those but it's 32 bits of data per pixel rather than 24 bits. RGBW is actually something of a pain to control. RGB gives you fairly good colour consistency but the white gives a constant colour temperature if you are often a fixed white colour. With 12V and long cable runs the white will also be a constant colour but varying brightness slightly as you get further from the power. The RGB side of the pixels will vary slightly in colour as you get further from the power.
Almost any pixel controller will do the job. With 252 pixels you could run (almost) direct from a Pi or 1 of the ESP32 boards.
252 pixels on a single run isn't too much drama but ideally you would either run some power injection somewhere past the halfway mark. This can be as simple as just running some 2.5mm2 figure 8 cable from the start to the + and - to somewhere past the 100 pixel mark.
252 4 colour pixels has a theoretical maximum current of about 18.5A if all the pixels and all 4 (R,,G, B and W) leds were all at 100% brightness.