Friday, January 12, 2018

The Enclosure

Below are a few pictures of the enclosure. It is 5-3/4" tall by 11" square.

This enclosure was twice the size of the original one I had purchased, and as you can see it was difficult to fit everything in the space. I have already started looking at updates for 2018.

As I start to building and reconfigure - I will try to keep the blog up-to-date. 



Tuesday, November 28, 2017

The Lights Are Up!

The lights finally arrived late Sunday and we have spent the last couple days programming on installing. I will post some more photos of the final enclosure build later.


Monday, November 13, 2017

Falcon F16v3


I am very excited that my Falcon Pixel Controller - the F16v3 has arrived. This board has 16 outputs able to handle 1024 pixel per output for a total 16,384 pixels. 

Unfortunately I am still waiting on my pixels and 12V power supply, so it will be a week or two before I am able to fire the board up. 

In the mean time I plan to purchase some Plexiglas and work on getting my enclosure fabricated so I am ready to start putting it together when my next shipment arrives. Hopefully everything will come in time for Christmas!

Saturday, November 11, 2017

Pixels

I ordered C9 LED Smart pixels from aliexpress.com. I purchased them from Ray Wu's store.
The pricing is significantly less expensive than purchasing them from a store in the US. The shipping charges were quite high, but still the total came in less than ordering locally. The other reason I purchased from Ray Wu's store was that his pixels already had the waterproof 3 core ends on them, he has extension 3 core wire, power injectors and power cords. I also purchased my power supply from Ray Wu. I also felt this his store had the most complete products, other store would have required purchasing from separate stores, I am pretty confident everything from Ray's store should connect together seamlessly.

Items that I purchased:

50noeds addressable RGB DC 12V WS2811 LED - 3 core 13.5mm
Plastic end caps for 13.5mm waterproof pigtails
3m 3 core waterproof extension cables - 13.5mm [for supply power and data to pixels]
3m 2 core waterproof extension cables - 13.5mm [for injection power]
3 core T type waterproof splitter - middle 2 core - power injector
NES-350-12 - 12 V power supply
M20 standard Ethernet connector RJ45 network connector
10psc - 3 core waterproof female connectors, 50 cm long, 13.5mm [for connecting into my Falcon Pixel Controller

I chose to use 12V pixels. That is why I purchased the 12V power supply. The Falcon Pixel Controller can run off of 12V or 5V - I will set mine up to run off 12V so I can power the pixel strands through the pixel controller and inject power as necessary.

A typical rule of thumb is that power injection is required for ever 100 pixels. This allows you to run the pixels in full bright white. If you run the pixels just one color at a time like red and at 30% brightness you are able to power a lot more pixels, however more power injection will have less limitations on the display.

Canispater Christmas has some pretty good videos on setting pixels up. Below is a video on power injection.


Component Enclosure

I purchased my enclosure from Amazon. I went with Super Power Supply WiFi Router Enclosure. http://amzn.to/2A1I4zI

I really like the integrated outlets in the enclosure. I think this will be an easy way to keep the high voltage wires separate from the low voltage.




Christmas Light Controller

Micro computer with WiFi and Bluetooth

I choose to use the Raspberry Pi 3 - Model B for my Christmas light display. This was the most recent Raspberry Pi available when ordering the components for my show. I like the newly integrated WiFi chip, so you no longer need to purchase a separate USB WiFi dongle. I went with a Samsung 32GB Micro SD card for the operating system and a 16GB SanDisk USB flash drive for the Media. It is important not to get too large of capacity drives. All drives need to be re-formatted to FAT32 and this cannot be done with the larger drives. 

I am going to use the Falcon Pixel Controller - F16v3 to run the pixels for my display. The board has been shipped and I am waiting for its arrival. In preparation of the F16v3, I have installed the most recent version of the Falcon player software. 

Instruction for setting up the Falcon player software on the Raspberry Pi can be found in the Falcon Christmas Form:

The Enclosure

Below are a few pictures of the enclosure. It is 5-3/4" tall by 11" square. This enclosure was twice the size of the original...