I need to put some LED to light the Kitchen counter… I will add 2 pieced of one meter each (LED1 and LED2) and I was wondering what would be the best option to write the led…
I am not looking for any super-fancy color, just few basis rules:
LED1 & LED2 both on
LED1 & LED2 both off
LED1 on & LED2 off
LED1 off & LED2 on
then i can definitely playing around with colourmap but not a priority…
As per picture below my HW is the following:
LED Strip: SK6812 RGBW
Voltage: 5V
Density: 60 leds/meter
Power: 18W / Meter
NodeMCU (ESP 8266)
and I was wondering:
should I segregate LED1 and LED2 or they can be all powered/controlled by one only power supply/NodeMCU
do I need a power supply or the 5V output of the NodeMCU can work?
the picture below is my brainstorming
any suggestion?
Note a side is for the wires: what AWG should I look to buy?
I think that you can go with option 3 because of the following.
The first two options cant be used because the nodemcu 5v supply can only support upto 1A output safely. Here 1m strip would need a current supply of about 2.5 to 3.5A. Also in normal conditions, its best to have a separation between the controlling chip and the led strips.
We could use two different esps to control the segments seperately but the same thing can be done using a single esp as the led strip is addressable. We can use the wled firmware to efficiently mark a single strip of led as two different segments and control seperately. The wled integration with HA will also recognize different segments as different lights and thus can be controlled independently. So
No need, you can control it with a single power supply and esp 8266 but make sure that you connect the led strips in series and not in parallel and also don’t mess the direction of the led strips. One thing you have to take care of is that you will need to power the led strip from both the starting and ending so that there is sufficient power throughout the strip.
Also instead of instead of wiring the esp and led strips to the same terminal headers, if there is a second header use it.
This is my understand I would recommend you to first test these setup and then only deploy.
Ideally the wire should be able to withstand a max of 5A to 7A if the led is run at full brightness. I cant tell about AWG standards as in my region we use a different systems. AWS 13 should be alright but i dont know if the the diameter of the wire would be more than what we could solder to the solder pads of the led strip.
I recomended AWG 13 guage because from what i read in internet it can hold a maximum of 7A current but we may not need that much guage if the lengths of wires used are less.
The data voltage is max 3v so a smaller cable would be fine. I personally use the strands inside the cat4 or cat6 cable used to do ethernet connections, the advantage is that these thin solid wires which help a huge amount when soldering to small solder pads.
Actually it doesn’t matter but from my experience I was able to better cool down the open type power adapter. Infact id we have a 5v fan we can just attach it over the adapter and power it some the 5v output itself. so that the device is always cool. This is an advantage but it doesn’t matter too much just make sure you get at least a 40w 5v power supply or best would be 50w 5v power supply since the total load of 2m strip could be 36w.
if I use something like the picture below, will it work or not? (what I mean is if the wire is too thick will it still transfer the date fine or it will generate problems? )
Actually having more thickness is good for data transmission especially over longer lengths. So you don’t have to worry about diameter of cables for data transmission, I recommended the ethernet cable because it is very thin and solid and so is easy to solder on to smaller solder pads such as that we have with led strips. You can absolutely use these without any issues.
