Technicolor users...

I know that the technicolor use a little more power than what is shown on Ray's site...how far are you guys going before you need to inject...I was getting away with 200 pixels with my 2801 pixels...looks like about 125 with the technicolor 2811's...

 

personally, i try to inject every 50 pixel, no matter what protocol or type of light i use, for me it is just the norm now.

however, I have managed to go 84 pixels prior to power issues, but these only appeared due to voltage loss because of the length of my lead wire to the lights anyway.

point to note,m this is with ray lights.. not technicolour

 

I am injecting every 60 pixels. I noticed pinkish pixels around 60 with these

 

BTW...I did do some Amperage testing on them...one all on, full white, 100 pixels is 5.2 amps DC

 

they are definitely 'heavier' than a standard 2811, I have been injecting at both ends of a 100 LED string to be on the safe side, as I also got pinkish hues without.

 

Glad to see I am not the only one noticing this. From what I have seen they use twice the power than stated on the site. This will now require some re-planning of power supplies....

 

If you look at the designs video. The 50 lights should not need power injections. The 100 string should have power injections and has the connection for the power injector (or should have) The next version will use SM5050 and use less power, which I think is not on sale yet. The design was hoping they be out this year. Update on Technicolor Pixels lenses and V2 Progress

 

I don't know how I missed this thread, because I thought I was clicking on anything and everything that said 'Technicolor'. Anyway, just getting around to building up my roof lights controller, which will drive 900 of the 12V Technicolor lights, and have come to the conclusion that I didn't get a big enough power supply... whoops...

Still irritating that the website says 0.3W just like every one of the other 8,000 RGB lights I ordered from Ray this year... Wish I would have seen this thread... The really bad part is that I was hoping to drive 900 of these Technicolor lights out of six of the outputs from a p12s and then use the other p12s to drive six strings of 70 each 12V pixels. Looks like I better go find an 800W power supply...

-Louie

 

Louis - one thing to keep in mind is that the P12S can only handle 2x40 Amp... For what I wanted to do (12 x 140 pixel) this was not enough so I had to power half of the strings outside the P12S.. I ended up with 4 x 400 W PSU...

 

Oh, I thought the p12s could only do 30A, but regardless, I was not planning on pushing that. Basically, I was planning on injecting at pixel 100 off the controller (for 101 through 150... and I'm not sure how that factors into the current draw for 1 through 100, so I'll just assume that the board is pushing all the current there) which would have been 30W per output so 2.5A, now that is going to be 5.0A per output which should still fly below the 30/40A limit per bank. On the other bank I was going to be a little better off with only 70 pixels per output, 42W so around 3.5A at the new 0.6W per pixel number.

I think what I'm going to plan on doing now is powering each bank of the p12s with a 350W power supply, going with a larger case, and figure out how to split this up a bit better... then moving the six 12V pixel ornaments over to a P2 or a 6804...

-Louie

 

one thing dave pitts and i have discussed is make it so xlights or the pi player could limit the max 0-255 value to say 0-200. we were thinking when R=G=B (white or grays) then logic would kick in (if you selected it to) to limit max values for white. we found we could go down to 62% of the 255 value and it still looked as bright. it gives you a 1/3 reduction in current draw on white.


Not perfect , but does not require getting more hardware.




this year we will look into implementing color curves for lights that are connected to xlights.

 

Cool Scott. I was wondering if that would be possible. I didn't try monkeying with the values yet (just like I haven't found a "warm white" that I like yet... too hard to do with the lights out in the yard, I need them back in my garage!)

-Louie

 

I double checked the fusing of the p12s and it says 30A per bank on my fuses. Also, the fusing is 7.5A per output. With 100 of these 12V Technicolor pixels per output, one would be hitting right around 57W per output. I had dialed my power supply down to around 10.5V based on the recommendations by several folks around the various forums and that would put the current draw at 5.4A per output which is more than 30A for six outputs by just a hair. Even if I was using the full 12V the current would have been close enough to 5A per output to push the 30A per bank limit.

I am going to post another thread separately about what happens to current draw from an output of a pixel controller when you power inject at the end of a pixel string...

-Louie

 

Thanks - 30 A per bank you are right. I am wondering if anyone has measured the current draw on 10 V... 5.4 A was on 12 V...