Queensland Regents Park

Yoshie

Yoshie

New elf
Joined
Jan 2, 2018
Messages
2
Hello there all,
Hope everyone had a fantastic Christmas. I've been lurking around on this site for awhile now. My first born is 2 will be 3 next year looking at creating a little light show for home. For Christmas and all other holidays with permanent LEDs on the house. Just unsure of I sold go string or strip. Some people say never go strip.

Josh
 
Welcome to ACL.
Plenty of debate on strip vs nodes (same with 5v vs 12v, Ford vs Holden etc) but my 2c:
Strip is good at acheiving nice straight lines very quickly. 12v strip usually has 3x LEDs per pixel/section so it has lower density but is fine for rooflines and outline etc. The downside is that if not treated with care the solder joins can break easily and whilst you may be handy with a soldering iron to repair, its maintinaing them to be waterproof that can be a little more tricky (adding silicone and clear heatshrink.)
Nodes however are (for me) simpler to repair, just cut out offending nodes and replace with new ones. Only need heatshrink over wire joins as the nodes themselves are already waterproof.
 
Welcome aboard, I'm just south of you at Jimboomba, and this year was my first with pixels.

I use both strips and nodes, however my first strip had the last 500mm of it DOA, and when I laid my lights out another strip did the same thing.

Nodes, from what I've seen only 3 nodes have failed out of over 2000.

Repairs, i.e. replacing failed sections is a hell of a lot easier with nodes, than with strips.

I only used strips in my leaping arches, but as you will hear strips are fairly fragile and break easily, but in leaping arches they do look good.

12v versus 5v .... that's "religious debate"..... there is no real 'best way' for that.

I've gone with 12v because of long runs, and less power injection (don't worry too much about that term at the moment). That said, I believe 5v is more energy efficient, however long runs will require power injection


I'm sure you've downloaded and read the ACL 101 here, very handy to understand what there is.

My first controller was a Falcon F16v3, but there are other options, but from what I've seen this is the favoured controller.
 
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