USING ONE WS2811 DRIVER FOR A WHOLE RGB LED STRIP

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kefon
 
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Joined: Sat May 23, 2015 12:38 pm

USING ONE WS2811 DRIVER FOR A WHOLE RGB LED STRIP

Post by kefon »

Hi everyone,

I work a lot with neopixels and LEDs, but this case is a bit special.
I'm trying to understand what is the best way to do what I need.
This post is mainly theory as I didn't wired anything yet.
(and sorry if this topic is not purely relying on Adafruit products)

So here is the background:
I'm working on a large art installation, and I need to control 54 LED strips, 2m each, so 6480 LEDs. (yeah...)
BUT! I only need to display one color for each strip, so 54 colors at a time.
(we don't really care for now about the number of power supplies I need...)
I need each strip to be considered as a unique long pixel.

So, instead of running a massive chained strip of 6480 neopixels
(much more that an arduino or trinket could handle),
I'm trying to find a way to consider each strip as a single neopixel,
and to control it like I usually control one strip of neopixel.

For now my plan is to use SMD5050 LED strips,
and adding a driver at the beginning of each strip.
strips.jpg
strips.jpg (45.57 KiB) Viewed 135 times
I'm looking for something that could act like the WS2811 driver in the neopixel,
to be capable of setting the color of a whole strip.
The best would also be to be able to use the neopixel library for these 54 "long pixels"
Is something like that is actually possible?
I can guess that the WS2811 is not powerful enough for a whole strip, or is it?

The other option I'm looking at is to use 11 TLC5940 multiplexers.
This will allow me to have enough pwm channels to drive the 54 x 3 (rgb) required pwm.
Again, does that sound possible? Is chaining 11 TLC5940 multiplexers feasible?

Sorry, this is a lot of question!
Thanks in advance for any tips on this :)

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adafruit_support_bill
 
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Re: USING ONE WS2811 DRIVER FOR A WHOLE RGB LED STRIP

Post by adafruit_support_bill »

We have analog strips in 30 or 60 pixels per meter
https://www.adafruit.com/product/346?length=1
https://www.adafruit.com/product/285

These can be driven with one FET per channel as shown here: https://learn.adafruit.com/rgb-led-strips/usage
The FETs can be controlled directly with a PWM pin on your processor. Or with a PWM chip such as the PCA9685:
https://www.adafruit.com/product/815
or the TLC59xxx series:
https://learn.adafruit.com/tlc5947-tlc5 ... t/overview

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kefon
 
Posts: 16
Joined: Sat May 23, 2015 12:38 pm

Re: USING ONE WS2811 DRIVER FOR A WHOLE RGB LED STRIP

Post by kefon »

Thank you Bill for your answer!
This is basically what I had in mind, but I couln't find the right boards.
I will spend some more time looking for other solution, maybe using neopixels
Thanks again! :)

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