Planning ahead

dougd

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Jan 24, 2012
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The best laid plans of men and mice often go awry.


I am hooking up half of arches, poles, fans, and candy canes. 128 pixels on each, all 12 volt. Had planned on going out of the same section of a 682. I was thinking, well these are all 2811's , no problems. Well hooked them all up today and they are 3 different colors, i forgot the although they are all 2811's, 2 are strips, 1 is nodes and 1 is modules, that is how you get 3 different colors. On to plan B for that dilemma.


2nd thing, the arches when hooked up, sort of strobe every few seconds, they control fine, but all I can do is describe as strobe every few seconds. I am using power injection on all props. When i disconnect the ground going to the power supply they don't strobe anymore. I tried a different power supply, same results. Anyone care to explain to me what might be going on there? Its to cold outside today to do much troubleshooting.
 

dougd

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Puzzled on this all evening read quite a few posts, still not sure what my problem is. My brain must not be working this morning.


Hooking up prop 1, ground and data from controller. Ground and +v from power supply. Data to data and +v to +v of pixels. Tie grounds together hook to ground of pixels.


When you think about that for a minute you can see that the ground from the power supply is now also the ground on the board.


Hooking up prop 2, ground and data from controller. Ground and +v from same power supply. Data to data and +v to +v of pixels. Tie grounds together hook to ground of pixels.


At that point pixels flash intermittent keeping the color of what ever the test color is. I unhook ground from power supply, flashing goes away. But now ground is coming through board instead of power supply.


So am I doing something wrong? If so I don't know what it is.
 

dougd

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Well it turns out it has something to do with the ray wu 4 pin connectors. Took it out of the equation and the pixels work fine. Crazy thing is the connector ohms out fine.


Going to watch my daughters college team play today. I will have to pick this up tommorow.
 

dougd

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Long story short, with some help from Jeff who was having similar problems, end result was I needed a null pixel.


Having never worked with 2811's before I learned the hard way that you cant even go 20 feet without adding a null pixel. Also found out you can go a lot longer with strip then nodes. The strips I went 25 feet with no problems at all.
 

fasteddy

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A lot of different factors will determine your max distance like the cable type used, the location of where the cable is run, the amount of load, just to name a few.
Yes and you will find that when using 2811 or other types that the RGB orientation varies between the type of lights used even though they are using the same IC and LED.
And finally plugs can cause many weird and wonderful issues. A plug may Ohm out OK but under load it may have issues and these can be a real pain to work out.
Glad to see your working through your issues, Im sure there will be many that will have some sort of issue when dealing with pixels as the level of complexity has now dramatically increased.
 
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