millzy Posted October 29, 2011 Share Posted October 29, 2011 Hey Thinking about putting together a set with some LED RGB tape that I can control via DMX. Possibly running along/down/inside some truss. The problem is looking for decent lengths, around 8m long the plan is to have 4x vertical 8m trusses on stage. Did a quick search round here and internet but couldn't find anything.Or anyone have any other ideas about how I can add colour along the the trusses. Thought about truss warmers but looking to mainly show off the height of the stage and bring another feature to the rest of the lights dotted around. I saw the idea from this house who uses LED tape around doors and windows. V. Cool!!! :) Cheers Matt Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Adam L F Posted October 29, 2011 Share Posted October 29, 2011 L.E.D. Tape such as this? It is all POA mind, or you could just do a quick look through Ebay and find some... interesting alternatives for cheap. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
peza2010 Posted October 29, 2011 Share Posted October 29, 2011 Some led tape allows you to join rolls of it together if you have some decent soldering skills - however you have got to check if the driver can power it all... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dbuckley Posted October 30, 2011 Share Posted October 30, 2011 With LED strip the first decision you need to make is digitally adressable or strip colour. With the former (sometimes called pixel LED) you can (to a greater or lesser degree) control each LED on the strip individually. Thats around 32 LEDs per metre length. The LEDs on the house in that video look of this type as they were able to chase along the strip. The strip colour sort do not let you control each LED indidually, but only all the LEDs along a strip. So the control systems are simpler, but you only get one colour per strip and it can't chase lengthwise. 8m length with either technology is no problem, it just needs a bit of divide can conquer to keep the current levels through the strip manageable. Heres 10m of pixel strip, clearly joined in the middle! http://davidbuckley.name/pix/prosc_leds_600x455.jpg This is using older generation technology that is relatively inflexible, using the HL1606 strip. This used an off-the-shelf controller. I'm now using later generation devices, using the WS2801 chip, and my own software and controllers, and having a lot of fun. Just doing a (wireless DMX controlled) light-up wedding dress; I delivered my bit today, now in the hands of the costumier to finish her magic. I'm really likeing this LED technology. So, with a few implimentations under my belt, I think I've got a decent handle on this technology, so feel free to ask away. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
timsabre Posted October 30, 2011 Share Posted October 30, 2011 Some led tape allows you to join rolls of it together if you have some decent soldering skills - however you have got to check if the driver can power it all... Most LED tape suffers from voltage drop down the length of the tape (the conductors on the tape are quite thin) - and on all the stuff I've worked with, 5 metres is about the most you can run in one go or it starts getting noticeably dimmer at the far end. You can get round this by feeding from both ends, or putting an extra feed in the middle, but this kind of defeats the object of having a longer length. Edit: just reading again your suggested application of colouring truss, LED tape isn't all that bright. It will be lost amongst other lighting. As an effect on a dark stage it would be great. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
millzy Posted October 30, 2011 Author Share Posted October 30, 2011 Some good suggestions... dbuckley - Thanks for the heads up on the different chips, did a few searches on google and led me to some interesting products, ideas and youtube videos. Like the idea of having the LED's individually addressed to get the patterns etc. Have you seen/made any DMX interfaces for these? Realise you need some meaty PSU's to drive them which shouldn't be too hard to sort. Even if I need to split them along a long distance then as long as they looked like one run then that would still work. We had a production company come in recently who had white LED strip along the front of some treads, who happened to leave a strip behind which I hooked up to an old sennheiser PSU and stuck it around my computer monitor. :) I also remember them using the following DMX/LED interface... Which looks like it will control a whole strip of RGB colour rather than individual LED's . But could be a cheaper solution... DMX LED Controller - CPC Edit: just reading again your suggested application of colouring truss, LED tape isn't all that bright. It will be lost amongst other lighting. As an effect on a dark stage it would be great. I think your right as an effect, facing the audience is should look sweet especially with some chases.Will continue to have a look round the net to piece together a system that could work... Thanks for the help. :) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dbuckley Posted October 30, 2011 Share Posted October 30, 2011 Have you seen/made any DMX interfaces for these? The pic I used above uses an off-the-shelf DMX controller, [link] with HL1606 LED strip [link]. However... that controller is a bit of a nightmare, as although you can control pattern (choice of about 80) and speed via DMX, you cant turn the bugger off!!!!! The absence of that feature makes the thing really hard to love. Still, DMX relay to the rescue, power the lot off. Not really good enough. I ended up bodging, after I learned the hard way - see last post in this thread. And watch out with these controllers; they may have a terminal marked VCC or +Ve or something, but it wont be 5V for the strip, probably be the controller input voltage! That's one of the reasons I decided I had to do my own software. Who would build a DMX LED controller you cant turn off via DMX? These LED strips are now used extensively by the Christmas Light enthusiasts, and now they are adopting DMX512 as their own, they would find this unacceptable. Realise you need some meaty PSU's to drive them which shouldn't be too hard to sort. Even if I need to split them along a long distance then as long as they looked like one run then that would still work.I use the 5V power supplies that you can get from Ray's site for many things. The wedding dress runs off batteries; a string of 50 LEDs uses about 2.5A when on white, so 4 x 1.2V NiCds will run the effect for tens of minutes on full white, and much longer when less demanding power-wise. If you want a longer than 5m strip then common the ground and data lines, and split the 5V line at the junction point. As long as the supply is isolated from electrical ground it'll work just fine. I also remember them using the following DMX/LED interface... DMX LED Controller - CPC Which looks like it will control a whole strip of RGB colour rather than individual LED's . But could be a cheaper solution...There are many variation in this type of controller, again Ray sells many sorts. They are cheaper, as there is just a load of LEDs and resistors in the strip, not an IC per LED. And with RGB strip you can have (with most controllers) 256 x 256 x 256 colours, but the strip can only be that colour. With digital pixel strip you can have more fun. But as I noted up top, how much fun depends on the chip in the strip - HL1606 can have each LED one of 7 colours (or off). WS2801 can have each LED one of 256 x 256 x 256 colours... My own software I'm wring on the propellor chip, specifically the Spin Stamp Microcontroller, which is small (size of 24 pin DIL socket), cheap ($30), means I don't need to build a PCB with either a 40 pin DIL and other stuff, or a bunch of SMT that's too small for my aging eyes, has free programming software, needs just a prop clip or plug as a programming interface ($15), has lots of free software going for it, has an active forum of really clever people, has onboard 5V reg to supply the SN75something DMX reciver. Unlike PICs or many other processors, it is very light on peripherals (eg no UART) but has eight processing engines ("cogs") each of which goes fast. DMX reception just requires a downloaded software module running in a cog. Very easy to get it doing pretty things on LEDs. Only drawback is its a 3.3v device, but LED strips are happy to accept its output. I've taken a different approach to most in the way I control the controller. 3 DMX channels control RGB "background" intensity of the whole strip. An effect is then overlaid onto the background. There is 3 RGB channels controlling the effect colour, and then a channel for effect selection (currently random, chase, and ripple), along with speed. With just that amount of control I get looks that are quite different to the out-of-the-box controllers, as well as most of the effects the standard controllers do. SO the microcontroller does the effect legwork, and the DMX controller makes the colour decisions. So having a colour changing background with apparently random colour twinkling on top is easy, all the colour control comes from DMX. Like I said - I'm having fun :) Embarrassing really; just a few years ago I said that LEDs would never amount to much. But the depth of application they have in the world of entertainment just keeps getting better, and I'm waxing lyrical over them. Humble pie well and truly eaten. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
millzy Posted October 30, 2011 Author Share Posted October 30, 2011 LOLThanks for your in depth reply, I can see your well into it!! http://www.blue-room.org.uk/public/style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gifWill start looking at all your links!! I'm really interested in all the electronics and connecting it all up to fit an application. Buying the bits and making it work, sounds like it could be a fun hobby! http://www.blue-room.org.uk/public/style_emoticons/default/wink.gifSpent the evening checking out the net seeing how people run their setups, using LED's in tubes and mapping video to these LEDS.Also love the idea of designing custom set pieces/logos etc made up entirely of these LED's. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dbuckley Posted October 30, 2011 Share Posted October 30, 2011 Its worth keeping an eye on what the Christmas (sorry - Holiday) light brigade do, (join the Planet Christmas forums and lurk for a while) as they are quite off-the-wall thinkers, and they've just discovered DMX512 in the last couple of years, though they seem to be missing out "our" cabling and going straight in with ACN DMX over Ethernet. They also build stuff. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
peternewman Posted November 3, 2011 Share Posted November 3, 2011 On the Christmas lights front, this site is always worth checking out. They started out with dirt cheap pixels at £6/7 quid for a single DMX addressable RGB board with 30 LEDs, they're now doing crazy waterproof strings of them, controlled via ArtNet or Streaming ACN! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ethan7557 Posted December 31, 2011 Share Posted December 31, 2011 They are awesome, and I believe the ones they are referencing is a different strip completely, I think, is WS2801 IC RGB strip, not the HL1606 one. The HL1606 I agree is a big pain to work with on the arduino having the PWM the entire strip and all. With the WS2801 each IC has its own internal clock so that it can do all the PWM for that specific LEDs. you send each IC 24 bits of greyscale data to determine the level of the red, green, and blue led and it does all the hard work for you. You can have 256 levels of red, 256 of blue, and 256 levels of green for each RGB LED. A TON of colors. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dmxlights Posted December 31, 2011 Share Posted December 31, 2011 I also remember them using the following DMX/LED interface... Which looks like it will control a whole strip of RGB colour rather than individual LED's . But could be a cheaper solution... DMX LED Controller - CPC I have bought ones form ebay and they are the same as the inside of the one from cpc as I have bought one to compair. here is the one on ebay http://www.ebay.ie/I...=item336fcb0591 and it 2 for the price of one from cpc. You should try Phenoptix for led strips http://www.phenoptix.com/ I also think the person that owns it is also a BlueRoom member. Have a look at the led floods that I made for colour washing walls Http://mcgcs.net/flood there here as well http://forums.phenop...c.php?f=6&t=399 I have also used them to light truss with one at the bottom and one at the top and white cloth around the truss. each light had a diffrent address so the truss could be lite in 2 diffrent colour making it look like 3 diffrent colours. Sorry I did not get photos of the setup. BigClive is a member on here and he was the one who made the board for the floods and sells them Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dbuckley Posted December 31, 2011 Share Posted December 31, 2011 I made a Bethleham star out of WS2801 strip recently, heres a poor picture of (most of) it showing some lovely colours... http://davidbuckley.name/pix/cross_rough.jpg I'm loving digital LEDs. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wol Posted December 31, 2011 Share Posted December 31, 2011 I'm loving digital LEDs. Compared to those old fashioned analogue LEDs? :P I do enjoy that chip though. Nice fast PWM as well so you dont get odd effects when it moves. I've got like 20 metres of the RGB pixel tape at home and currently have it dangling on my door. Nice stuff. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bigclive Posted December 31, 2011 Share Posted December 31, 2011 Have a look at the led floods that I made for colour washing walls Http://mcgcs.net/flood there here as well http://forums.phenop...c.php?f=6&t=399 I have also used them to light truss with one at the bottom and one at the top and white cloth around the truss. each light had a diffrent address so the truss could be lite in 2 diffrent colour making it look like 3 diffrent colours. Sorry I did not get photos of the setup. BigClive is a member on here and he was the one who made the board for the floods and sells them I sure am. I have to admit that I'm quite proud of my superflux floodlight panels. They turned out to be much better than I had anticipated when I designed them. They've found a lot of other uses where a simple weather resistant LED fixture is needed. Best of all, I designed them from the ground up to be utterly serviceable. The use of a single sided PCB and chunky tracks means that replacing dead LEDs is easy. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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