So I'm looking for addressable LED strips and a good controller compatible with Hubitat. Use case is a game room using the below channels. (Diffuse covers) There will be 2 bars about 3" apart running horizontally around the entire room (similar to picture below). Overall around 75' worth of continuous LED strips on each bar. Recommendations?
So just to be clear, 2 strips, each of 35' each. - Do they need to be independently controlled? - Are your looking for:
Also, any preferences requirements for brightness, mounting location, protocol (I'm assuming wireless, but does ZB, ZW, WiFi or Matter make a difference) and/or distance from the strip to the controller(s)? - Where greater distances for wiring is a bigger problem for low voltage strips - As you basically have 5V, 12V and 24V choices.
I just did about 50' across 6 strips in undershelf lighting for an office, so all this is fairly fresh in my mind around options/tradeoffs. And FYI, the typical max length of a given strip is 5m, so getting to 35' is going to likely require more than a single strip - and power/control logic is unidirectional and feed from 1 end.
The mounting and covers are the easy part - Clean (noise free) control wiring and power distribution are the tricky aspects.
Sorry, each bar is about 75 feet so 150.
Color Control.
Occasionally or have several sections of different color on a bar. (lets say 2 feet of red, 6 feet of blue, 1 foot of purple etc)
just below the ceiling line.
Imagine something like this
The above will require per pixel control, which isn't what most strips do. - and 75' is like 23m, so your talking 5 strips for each "bar" - If you can live with different sections (and colors/brightness) falling on the strip boundaries that makes thing easier. - If you really want to independantly control each foot across all the strips, that makes narrows your field of options.
I'm assuming you can get behind where ever this are mounted, as your going to have to power inject, and send control signals to each strip that makes up a bar - so 4 or 5 points for connection to each strip.. You just can't solder together a single 75' strip, and have the power and single propogate those lengths. If you run high voltages (24V) over heavier gauge wires, that's helps with the losses, but a typical multiple color strip is 5-20W/meter - depending on the brightness and density you want - see:
So you can do the math on ft->m, and come up with a power budget (and corresponding PS need). - I liked 24V for room/shelf lightening, and then I used 18 AWG feed wires, but I had about 20 feet from the controller to the strip. - There are more choice in the 5-12V options, but 150' of strips, is likely a few thousand pixels, and likely around 500-700W of power.
I used the following to come up with options: https://www.superlightingled.com/multicolor-rgb-led-strips-c-3.html and my builder recommended LED Tape Light & LED Strip Light: Indoor, Outdoor, & RGB | Diode LED (I didn't actually use them)
And Amazon is always a source for strips. I ended up buy a bunch of different densities and color to sort out what strip type I wanted before buying the full lengths.
Finally, I used a PixelBlaze controller, given it's fairly strong integration with HE, but that's more of a higher end thing, and if you just want color control of a full strip, there are easier ways to do that.
Another education site is: How Much Electricity Does An LED Strip Light Use? A Complete Guide - Custom LED Strip Manufacturer From China
What I'm looking for
No way to get a solid run for each "bar"?
The you want to look at "addressable" LED strips - There a multiple different protocols and wiring options - At a min, 3 wires per strip (power, signal, ground), and at a max, some strips use 5 feed wires (I used cable with 4 wires to each strip). - Pixel Blaze is a bit of a learning curve, but it will likely do what you want - See links above for some details, as well as HE driver and segmenting options.
As for a long strip - Yes, that's possible - Especially at higher voltage (aka 48V) - See:
https://www.superlightingled.com/dc-48v-led-strip-lights-c-315_614.html for long length 20-40m options - at 48V you need to start being more careful with wiring and NEC. - with 12V and 24V, it's still all consider "low voltage" - I'm not aware of 48V addressable strips.
There ARE 24V addressable strips (what I'm using) - See: Is There A 24V Individually Addressable LED Strip? – SuperLightingLED Blog
And look at the bottom table, below - as there are some 10m lengths for 24V addressible.
You just need start worrying about signal proprogation losses in addressible LEDS on long runs. - I had to add an extra ground wire to eliminate flickering on 5M runs (on a fairly long feeder/power distribution cable to the strip itself)
Hey Rick, I'd suggest looking at the pixelblaze. Incredible level of control and someone wrote a community integration. It's a WiFi device but the connectivity is reliable. BTF makes some quality LED strips
Another option would be a gledopto esp32 controller coupled with wled. There’s a solid community driver that works very well and it’s a very cost effective solution.
I like that you are using drywall channels. That will look great.
Because you are tearing up the walls you can add power injection along the strip easily.
Use WLED or Pixelblaze.
Get a controller that supports WLED and there are actually 2 community drivers for WLED. I would get the Dig-Quad from DrZZs, he has with external antenna for more reliability on the WiFi or even with an Ethernet connection for even better communications. All controllers for addressable LEDs are WiFi unless there is some new one out lately. PixelBlaze is also nice but is not as feature rich as WLED especially with segments and I personally outgrew PixelBlaze as to the capabilities and support since WLED is everywhere. Many of the commercial permanent adressable lights are WLED compatible and even some use a commercial variation of WLED in the background.
As for the length and voltage, if you don't mind running power on larger wires inside the walls and doing some power injection every 20 feet, you can get away with 5V but 12V would be the best as you will not need as many Amps to drive the LEDs at full brightness. Power injection would be recommended at least from both ends with 12V. BTW, the controller power AND the data line is 5V on all LED strips even if the power is 12V or 24V for the strip it self, not all controllers support having higher than 5V, so that needs to be checked also (Dig-Quad does support from 5V to 24V).
I would recommend getting 12V RGBWW addressable LEDs as they also have Warm and Cold White LEDs at each pixel for better whites. Also get them from a reputable company if you want to have nice colors, the cheap ones will end up in the garbage eventually as the colors will not be very nice.
You will also need to size the power supply accordingly based on 100% brightness of all LEDs, if you have a smaller power supply, you can set the max Amps drawn in WLED so that you don't overload the PS.
Great Summary, and appreciate the mention of the DrZZ stuff - Also a good option. My only difference of opinion, would be to go with 24V strips, given the 23m run lengths that are being talked about. - It looks like the DigiQuad/Octa both support 24V. Any yes, the RGBWW strips are nicer - I finally settled on BFT, with 84 pixels/m from Amazon - The longer strip length in this project may make this not suitable.
I'm just getting started in PixelBlaze segmenting, but I'll review some of the DrZZ options as well. - Thanks for the tip!
Fresh framing. Open store room off the room so all electrical controls for him can be mounted in there.
If I run 24, could that power 50-75' lengths without injecting in the middle?
I'm not an electrician, and I'm guessing it depends on the internal wire gauge of the strip, but my personal guess, based on recent experiences, is that your going to need BOTH 24V and at least one power injection point.
And actually, my bigger problem was noise (per an oscilloscope and flicker at the end of the strip) on the signal line, I had to have ground wires on each side of that wire and nothing in the ribbon cable floating. My sense is that's very installation dependent, and also depends on the feeder length from the controller, and how much noise is in the environment.. - They also make strips with redundant data/signal lines, to help with signal loss on long runs - But I have no direct experience there.
That's likely going to take some "try before you buy testing" and test with the lengths in your environment, versus just on the bench.
Again, YMMV, but the above was my recent experience.. - Curious to hear @nclark comments
It should not be a problem as long as you inject at both ends of the strips, also, if you never turn everything single LED in the stripat 100%, the requirements will be less.
Depending on the strip, some strips have built in repeaters but most don't and having a repeater in the middle will help, but since you are powering a repeater in the middle, might as well inject power at the same time.
If you will be using white in your room, I would highly recommend going with RGB-CT. Those have both a Warm White and Cool White.
That’s what I went with in my kitchen, though I decided not to go with per pixel control as I wasn’t finding a solution that really did what I was looking for… I probably should have asked the community! There are some great ideas and options coming up!
I purchased all my LED rolls (I bought quite a few!) and my 10+ controllers from AliExpress. Very happy with my purchases.
BTW - most of them are in cabinets, but I did put a small strip in a channel in the ceiling. The strips are of small length unfortunately, and there tends to be a small bump at their intersection. Something to be aware of…
The way how it works each addressable LED is a repeater. The problem is - LED output is not designed to drive long cable. I.e some sort of signal booster maybe needed if strips are serially connected. My recommendation is: 24V LED Strips (power injection may be needed) driven by Pixelblaze. PixelBlaze Output Expander could be a BIG help because it can drive in parallel up to 8 LED strips but logically they will be independent.
Hi Sebastian, would you have a link that you could share?
Hey @rlithgow1,
WLED is exactly what you're looking for. Wifi esp32 or pixelblaze.
Due to the lengths, you'll probably need to add power injection. As far as Im aware, signal degredation isn't an issue as each ialed acts as a booster of sorts.
I have several long strips of BTF lighting, around 4m per strip. Believe it or not, this works fine for a single 5v source at one end of the strip, looks fine. You can see the far end become brighter if I inject power, but I don't think it's noticeable without.
To get some solid answers and guidance, I'd seriously recommend checking this out
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