So, things started few weeks back when my young lady was browsing DIY ideas for our new home. She got stuck on a youtube video and wanted me to do similar in our home this Christmas.
Of course I am not going to do this Christmas I am out of 0s in my funds. But being the curious George I went and tried to find out How its done.
The Johnson's family was pretty generous in describing how they did it in their Video comments so tried to find cost of all components he used and WOW it will cost around $2000 for such setup...
Well, what all did he used
1) Several Individually addressable LED strips and strings. Created structures using the strip and strings.($3-$30 per meter and comes in variation of 30, 48, 60 or 144 led per meter)
2) Controllers like pixlite 16 or Sandevice e682 ($200 per board to handle upto 5440 LEDs per board)
3) Raspberry Pi ($40-$50)
4) Power Supply ($5-$100, depending on number of LEDs per PS and now many sets to be used)
5) Software, Vixen 3 (Free to create the show, generate the data and run the show.)
6) and too much muscles.
Well said...
For newbies like me (at least in this area) many things were pretty new, so went ahead and researched about these
Individually Addressable LED:
The basic ingredient of the recipe. They come in various flavors (WS2801, WS2811, WS2812, HL1606, LDP8806 etc) and differs in the way how they handle data, their input voltage and communication mechanism.
The most advance, at least I know, available is WS2812b. Whats better in it? Smart controller with easy control scheme, 8 bits, 256 levels per channel, 16.7 million colors total.
Each LED in the strip is a combination of R, G, B led and a controller chip (WS2812). The LED has 4 soldering pins (varies with the version of LED, here WS2812b is used for reference).
VDD, input voltage
VSS, Ground
DIN, DataIn
DOUT, Data out
When an LED receives data in DIN pin it picks the first 3 bytes of data it received, illuminates the R,G and B led with each byte of data and then sends rest of the data to the DOUT pin. The DOUT is connected to DIN of the next LED and hence each LED could be controlled. What else makes it better from her predecessors? You once send the data and they could hold that until you send the next once, the predecessors needed continuous data to be sent to keep them illuminated.
Pretty interesting huh,
Pixelite 16:
What's that?
The LED strip can read the data and illuminate the LED, but who will send that data to LED strips? That could be achieved by PC, Raspberry Pi, Aurdino or any other such board but the problem is how to control thousands of LED via a single channel of output. The PC boards are not able to handle that much traffic on single GPIO and if multiple GPIO would be used then it would not be possible for the boards to process that much data in nano second cycle.
The device that could be used overcome these limitations are controller boards.
There are various boards available in market and they differ in number of channels they can cater, the format of data that they can handle and the type of LEDs they can use (remember the different versions of LEDs). The Pixlite 16 is one of such board, which can cater up to 16 channels of LED and supports E1.31 and art-net communication (what are these? still need to understand). This board connects over ethernet to get data and transfer them to LED strips and can handle up to 340 LEDs per channel means 5440 LEDs per board.
Raspberry Pi:
I believe there is nothing much to describe this board except it is self explanatory. Well any such board or a PC could be used to perform this Job.
The Job?
Yes, to read the show and send signals/data to the controller board like Pixlite 16. The configuration from the software is read, translated, processed and send to controllers using routers.
Software, Vixen 3:
Ok, Now is the interesting part.
Really?
I don't know. There are various softwares to do this like Q light, light o rama, Light jams etc and there are open sources as well.
What all can you do with these softwares.
- Take picture of your home.
- Drag and drop lights in various parts of the picture.
- Configure the number of LEDs in each series
- Add music files and create timelines
- Set the format of light illumination per time line in each series, like the color, running pattern etc.
- Set the network communication interfaces with each series.
and many more steps
- Export, the configuration to a self running image and upload to the board.
Now there onwards the board will run to play music as well as the light show.
Now it makes sense.
COST:
Lets try to figure out all hardware.
Number of Pixels: ~6000, means roughly 200 meters of light strips (considering 30 pixels per meter)
Number of Christmas light: ~500, means ~20 strings
Number of Controller boards: 6
Raspberry Pi: 1
Power Supply: 2
If I try to buy most of these stuff out from China market the cost would be
| Pixels (LEDs): | 200 x 3.5 | 700 |
| Christmas light: | 20 x 2 | 40 |
| Controller boards: | 200 x 6 | 1200 |
| Raspberry Pi: | 20 x 2 | 40 |
| Power Supply: | 2 x 30 | 60 |
| Total: | $ 2040 |
and this does not include extra stuff like extensions, other stuff used to create structures like arc, Cone and tree.
It seems pretty high right. So the main culprit who is eating money is the controller boards.
Coming Up, I would try to figure out how to reduce that cost.
