Need some advice

thebaddruid

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Joined
Oct 26, 2011
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First I would like to say Hello and I have really found a ton of useful information on your site. This will be my first year doing a computerized show. My wife has been really supportive and even helped me clean out a local target when the leds went half price after Halloween.


Ok first off I live in the US and I have a ton of ac powered led lights, can these be modified to run off of dc power? I saw a few videos on converting the 240 volt ac leds into dc and is the process the same? If I could convert them I would like to use the LOR DC controller boards to set up a small 32 channel show. My next question is about RGB's and I would like to get a string of pixel control rgb lights to run 6 mini trees in the yard. Could one string of pixel control RGB be able to control 6 trees? I have been looking at Ray Wu's shop and I am a bit confused on what I need to get to power the dc boards and which lights to buy and which controller to control the pixel lights.


Lastly I saw the LOR CCR's and would like to get a cheap alternative to make and control 2 strips of RGB pixel control and control 2 dummy rgb strips.


I know it is really late in the game but I have until next January off from work and this is one thing that could help keep me sane. Thanks in advance for any advice.
Chuck
 

fasteddy

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thebaddruid said:
First I would like to say Hello and I have really found a ton of useful information on your site. This will be my first year doing a computerized show. My wife has been really supportive and even helped me clean out a local target when the leds went half price after Halloween.

Welcome to ACL, your a lucky man having a supportive wife, looks like she caught CLAP (Christmas Lighting Addiction Problem) from you

thebaddruid said:
Ok first off I live in the US and I have a ton of ac powered led lights, can these be modified to run off of dc power? I saw a few videos on converting the 240 volt ac leds into dc and is the process the same? If I could convert them I would like to use the LOR DC controller boards to set up a small 32 channel show.

This will depend on the voltage of the strings. In Australia due to the dangers of 240V AC most light strings are transformed down to 24v. In the US many strings do not have a transformer and run at 110V. These would not be able to run on any DC board due to the voltage. If you do have a transformer for your lights that drops the voltage then you can generally run these from a DC controller, if they have a controller then you can bypass these as the video suggested

thebaddruid said:
My next question is about RGB's and I would like to get a string of pixel control rgb lights to run 6 mini trees in the yard. Could one string of pixel control RGB be able to control 6 trees?

You would really need a string per tree to get any decent effect as they generally come in a string of 50

thebaddruid said:
I have been looking at Ray Wu's shop and I am a bit confused on what I need to get to power the dc boards and which lights to buy and which controller to control the pixel lights.

there are many options and if you haven't looked at this presentation and video series here yet then i highly recommend that you do that first

thebaddruid said:
Lastly I saw the LOR CCR's and would like to get a cheap alternative to make and control 2 strips of RGB pixel control and control 2 dummy rgb strip

The CCR is a 6803 IC strip and the CCR controller allows this strip to have 2 million colours by sending the data at a higher refresh rate. The 6803 strip used with a generic controller will give you 32768 colours as it will use a standard refresh rate. So you could buy a CCR controller by itself and then use this strip or you could buy a cheap DMX $16 6803 strip controllerfrom ray but you cant set the starting address of these. The other option is to buy the strip and the controller together from ray which can be found here (6803 IC) and here (1809 IC) and here (2801 IC)

But ensure you read and understand the difference in the strip IC before making a decision by looking at the above link to the video and presentation series on RGB lighting

thebaddruid said:
I know it is really late in the game but I have until next January off from work and this is one thing that could help keep me sane. Thanks in advance for any advice.
Chuck

I wish you the best with it
 

thebaddruid

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Joined
Oct 26, 2011
Messages
3
Thank you so much. I am researching my old led strings to see if they can be modified or I just may find a ac controller to control them instead of trying to convert them to DC. I have seen many types of control boards that are no longer being made like tiger. It seems light o rama is back up, is there any recommendations for a good ac controller and can I run the dmx through this board?
 

fasteddy

I have C.L.A.P
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No one here offers any AC boards, LOR is what most here will use for AC control. If you choose an LOR AC board you can run this with DMX, i run all my LOR gear in a DMX universe. I have a presentation on how to run LOR controllers in DMX which can be found here

there are other DIY options like the renard and the lynx controllers but i wonder if you would be able to source all the parts and build these controllers in time
 

thebaddruid

New elf
Joined
Oct 26, 2011
Messages
3
That power point did the trick. I could not grasp how the controllers sent signals to each other but now I see how it all works. I will hope that LOR will open up orders soon so I can get on the list. I see a 2 to 3 week wait for dc boards but then if I could not mod my lights then I would have to buy inverters for each one of them and that is a butt more cables. Thanks a bunch.
 
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