Where/Why should we use P5 or P10 LED matrix displays??

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OldMarty

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Hi all,

I'm about to buy either P5 or P10 LED displays, but not entirely sure of the pro's & cons of each display.

Should i even bother with P5's if i'm not trying to achieve hi-resolution video screens?
Maybe i should just go with P10's for simple colour shows and basic "Tune to" texts etc?

As P10 panels contain less LEDs, i guess maybe that's something to consider for my LED counts/assignments/performance etc?

Also, what are the limitations with P5 @ 1/16th scan rates versus P10 @ 1/8th scan rates?


I'm either going to control the panels with a Raspberry Pi or Beaglebone, but i don't know WHY or WHICH controller to choose.
They're basically 2 smallform computers to me lol, so WHY do people choose one over the other?

I realise i also need a hat to connect to either of the controllers to allow interfacing to the LED panels.

Thanks in advance.
 
Price difference last time I looked, wasn't much difference between the P10 and P5 panels.

How you control them, well that's a good question. Some use a Octoscroller which needs a BBB to plug in to, or a colourlight card, which you can communicate mostly from a Pi, but I believe you can also use a BBB for.

I could not get my 5 x 2 P5 panels to work with a Octoscroller, so gave up and went with a Pi and Colourlight card, the combo has now done their second Christmas.
 
One of the first things to consider is the viewing distance. P5 panels are not too bad viewing from about 3meters, 5 meters is better. P10 panels will need to be view from further away. I am using 2xP5 panels as a tune to/message sign and find that the distances mentioned above are pretty good and would not like to be using P10 panels at this distance. I am controling my panel using a Beagle Bone Black wireless with an Octoscroller and not having any issues. The Pi 3+ or Pi4 do not control the panels anywhere near as good as the BeagleBone.
 
bpratt said:
Price difference last time I looked, wasn't much difference between the P10 and P5 panels.

How you control them, well that's a good question. Some use a Octoscroller which needs a BBB to plug in to, or a colourlight card, which you can communicate mostly from a Pi, but I believe you can also use a BBB for.

I could not get my 5 x 2 P5 panels to work with a Octoscroller, so gave up and went with a Pi and Colourlight card, the combo has now done their second Christmas.
Click to expand...
Thanks for your info.

Yep, the panels are only $4 or $5 difference, nothing to worry about there.
 
orchidman33 said:
One of the first things to consider is the viewing distance. P5 panels are not too bad viewing from about 3meters, 5 meters is better. P10 panels will need to be view from further away. I am using 2xP5 panels as a tune to/message sign and find that the distances mentioned above are pretty good and would not like to be using P10 panels at this distance. I am controling my panel using a Beagle Bone Black wireless with an Octoscroller and not having any issues. The Pi 3+ or Pi4 do not control the panels anywhere near as good as the BeagleBone.
Click to expand...
Thanks for your info.

Yes, viewing distance/resolution was a concern for me, so thanks for confirming 3-5metres viewing distance for a P5 panel.
I think the front of my house/chimney is about 5 metres from the footpath, so that's all good ;-)

Good to know the Pi's don't quite match the Beaglebone in performance.
 
I've got 2 p5 cabinets that were part of one of those giant LED billboards that you see lighting up the sky at night while driving around town. I replaced the dead Linsn driver cards with colorlight cards. Not overly difficult to set up, works very well. Driven from a Pi 4 using FPP with xlights used to set up what is displayed on the screens.
 
The only item left not mentioned would be power consumption. The P5s use more power due to the higher number of LEDs of course. Also, it seems that each matrix cabinet would need it's own pi/bb with the hat or colorlight card to drive it. I am planning on adding 3 new matrixes to my show this year and came to that conclusion. Unless they are really close they will each need a set of controllers.

Dean
 
Indigogyre said:
The only item left not mentioned would be power consumption. The P5s use more power due to the higher number of LEDs of course. Also, it seems that each matrix cabinet would need it's own pi/bb with the hat or colorlight card to drive it. I am planning on adding 3 new matrixes to my show this year and came to that conclusion. Unless they are really close they will each need a set of controllers.

Dean
Click to expand...
I think the colorlight cards can be daisychained. This will need setting up in the cards config of course, but setting them as individual matrix panels shouldn't be too difficult. I'll have to give it a go with my two. Should be as simple as specifying the start channel of each panel array and how many lights are in the panel array.
 
Notenoughlights said:
I think the colorlight cards can be daisychained. This will need setting up in the cards config of course, but setting them as individual matrix panels shouldn't be too difficult. I'll have to give it a go with my two. Should be as simple as specifying the start channel of each panel array and how many lights are in the panel array.
Click to expand...
Would be good to know. First time trying to use a colorlight card and they have a big learning curve.

Dean
 
Indigogyre said:
I understand they can be daisy chained for a large single panel but what I am really wondering about is can you chain them for different matrix panels.
So Panel one might be a 3x4 matrix and then chain that to a matrix say 1x3 maybe 15 feet away for a completely different effect.

Dean
Click to expand...
I'll give it a try this weekend and see how it goes. I've got an xlights profile dedicated just to these stupid panels so I can get them working without breaking anything else 🤣
 
Indigogyre said:
Would be good to know. First time trying to use a colorlight card and they have a big learning curve.

Dean
Click to expand...
I've managed to do it with little difficulty. You'll need to follow the guide on setting up multiple colorlight cards if you plan to use one card per screen.

I set the FPP output led panels tab to the width of the panels but double the height, i.e one panel is 6 tiles wide 7 tiles high, where two panels are 6 tiles wide 14 tiles high. You will need to take note of how many channels are in each panel, i.e panel 1 has 129024 channels. In xlights (this is a blank install with only these panels, your numbers will be different) Start channel = 1. End channel = 129024 for panel 1. Start channel 129025 end channel 258048. You may need to manually adjust universe numbers so they don't end up taking a full universe in my instance I had 252 universes per panel, with one part universe of 504 at the very end. 20220130_153946.jpg
 
Notenoughlights said:
I've managed to do it with little difficulty. You'll need to follow the guide on setting up multiple colorlight cards if you plan to use one card per screen.

I set the FPP output led panels tab to the width of the panels but double the height, i.e one panel is 6 tiles wide 7 tiles high, where two panels are 6 tiles wide 14 tiles high. You will need to take note of how many channels are in each panel, i.e panel 1 has 129024 channels. In xlights (this is a blank install with only these panels, your numbers will be different) Start channel = 1. End channel = 129024 for panel 1. Start channel 129025 end channel 258048. You may need to manually adjust universe numbers so they don't end up taking a full universe in my instance I had 252 universes per panel, with one part universe of 504 at the very end.
Click to expand...

That is so awesome! Thank you very much for testing that.

Dean
 
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