QuinLED-Dig-Octa System
Specific Example Configurations
With the QuinLED-Dig-Octa system being as modular as it is that also comes with the complexity of overviewing configurations. Below will be a few configurations which are specifically tailored to a singular use case.
The 5v “Monster” (Megatree)
A mega tree is a well known prop for in a Christmas show. It consists of a fair amount of ws2811 LED bulbs and can use a fair amount of power because of it. Generally these are run using a local controller box beneath the tree.
Since this box is very close to the tree you can switch from using 12v pixels to using 5v pixels. The advantage is that these are generally a bit cheaper to buy and the normal disadvantage of voltage drop over distance and needing a lot of injections is not that much of a problem because all those connections are close by so you don’t need very long cables.
- 1x QuinLED-Dig-Octa Brainboard-32-8L
- With 1 board you have up to 8 LED channels and around 2000 (WLED) or 3000 (ESPixelstick) pixels you can control while staying above 40FPS
- With 3000 LEDs and strings of 100 LEDs you can have 30 strings in the mega tree
- If you need more total pixels you can easily add a second brainboard
- With 3000 LEDs and strings of 100 LEDs you can have 30 strings in the mega tree
- With 1 board you have up to 8 LED channels and around 2000 (WLED) or 3000 (ESPixelstick) pixels you can control while staying above 40FPS
- 1x QuinLED-Dig-Octa Powerboard Power-7HC
- The Power-7HC allows you to run up to 100Amps through the powerboard and provides 16x screw terminal
- With all 16 terminals used each can still deliver up to 6,25Amps
- According to my real-world power sheet 100x 5v ws2811 bullet pixels can use up to 6Amps
- According to the real-world power sheet we can run 16 x 100 pixels = 1600 pixels when running full tilt 100% RGB white but real-world using 50% RGB white power as a maximum you could run up to 3200 5v pixels without any compromise to single or mixed color brightness
- According to my real-world power sheet 100x 5v ws2811 bullet pixels can use up to 6Amps
- With all 16 terminals used each can still deliver up to 6,25Amps
- The Power-7HC allows you to run up to 100Amps through the powerboard and provides 16x screw terminal
- 1x Mean Well LRS-600-5
- Able to deliver 100Amps @ 5v you should be able to max out even the HC version of the powerboards and plenty of power
Downsides to this configuration is that the Power-7HC isn’t stackable while keeping access to the screw terminals. However if you are building this into a project box that you pre-wire with pigtail connections to the outside this isn’t that big of a problem and you can wire up the Power-7HC before placing a second Power-7HC (or other powerboard) on top of it.
12v house strip lighting
You’ve seen these cool LED strips mounted to the side of the house in various videos and photos and you want to have that on your house also. There is lots of ways to go about it but since this generally involves a bit longer wires going with 12v LED strip is going to save you a lot of time and hassle.
12v 96LEDs/m ws2811 “bright” version
One type of strip that is awesome to use is 96LEDs/m ws2811. It’s 12v and per 3 addressable but it’s spacing is basically the same as a 5v 30LEDs/m strip with the 12v 96LEDs/m having 32 addressable zones per meter.
Let’s say you want to design the system for running 30 meter of LED strip right now but might want to expand in the future.
With 30m of 96LEDs/m strip we’re talking 2880 LEDs in total and 960 addressable zones. With that many zones it means we’ll want to use at least 2 data output ports to keep a decent framerate.
For the LEDs, looking at the real world power usage sheet we see that 1 strip of 5m uses about 60w at 50% RGB white. That’s 480LEDs so 60w/480 = 0,125w per LED. Scaling that up to 2880 x 0,125w = 360w in total. 360w / 12v = 30Amps total nominal usage with a maximum potential of 60Amps peak.
- 1x QuinLED-Dig-Octa Brainboard-32-8L
- With 1 board you have up to 8 LED channels and around 2000 (WLED) or 3000 (ESPixelstick) pixels you can control while staying above 40FPS
- 1x QuinLED-Dig-Octa Powerboard power-5
- With 12x pluggable terminals and a max continuous power of 50Amps one board is enough to satisfy the requirements of the 30 meters of strip.
- The Power-5 takes handles up to 14AWG cable on the outputs, if you need thicker cables because of distance you can also choose to get the Power-7 which is able to take 12AWG cable in the output terminals
- With 12x pluggable terminals and a max continuous power of 50Amps one board is enough to satisfy the requirements of the 30 meters of strip.
- 1x Mean Well LRS-600-12
- Delivers up to 50Amps 12v so plenty of power even if you max out the normal version of the powerboard!
The mentioned 12v 96LEDs/m ws2811 strip has extra thick copper traces in it and because of that it can be run with a single front injection for a single strip or up to 10m with a front + end injection when calculating with nominal power of 60w per 5 meter. That means you can run any single or multi-color effect without compromise.
In theory the 30m can be run with 30Amps / 4Amps = 7,5 power injections however in practice when also using “middle” injections (can handle double the current) instead of only endpoint injections this can likely be reduced to around 5 or 6 total power cables.
The above system can easily be expanded with more LED channels or more power connections if more LED strips get added.
12v 60LEDs/m ws2815 version
Another popular choice is using 12v ws2815 LEDs. Plenty bright and they have the advantage of being 12v while also still being single addressable LEDs. Another advantage they come with is being 1 LED fault tolerant through a secondary backup data line.
Let’s say you want to design the system for running 30 meter of LED strip right now but might want to expand in the future.
With 30m of 60LEDs/m strip we’re talking 1800 LEDs in total and 1800 addressable zones. With that many zones it means we’ll want to use at least 3 data output ports to keep a decent framerate!
For the LEDs, looking at the real world power usage sheet we see that 1 strip of 5m uses about 50w at 100% RGB white. Normally however we generally calculate with the 50% RGB white value but ws2815 is an exception to that rule. Because it’s single addressable 12v even when just running one color 100% it will use the same amount of power as 100% RGB white and thus we need to calculate with the 100% value of 50w. Calculating that it’s 300LEDs so 50w/300 = 0,17w per LED. Scaling that up to 1800 x 0,17w = 306w in total. 306w / 12v = 25,5Amps total maximum usage with a maximum potential of 25,5Amps peak.
- 1x QuinLED-Dig-Octa Brainboard-32-8L
- With 1 board you have up to 8 LED channels and around 2000 (WLED) or 3000 (ESPixelstick) pixels you can control while staying above 40FPS
- Because the amount of LEDs is above 600 I recommend using 2 more data lines (in total 3) and splitting the LEDs across those to keep the framerate above 42FPS (WLED Default).
- With 1 board you have up to 8 LED channels and around 2000 (WLED) or 3000 (ESPixelstick) pixels you can control while staying above 40FPS
- 1x QuinLED-Dig-Octa Powerboard power-5
- With 12x pluggable terminals and a max continuous power of 50Amps one board is enough to satisfy the requirements of the 30 meters of strip.
- The Power-5 takes up to 14AWG cable, if you need thicker cables because of distance you can also choose to get the Power-7 which is able to take 12AWG cable in the output terminals
- With 12x pluggable terminals and a max continuous power of 50Amps one board is enough to satisfy the requirements of the 30 meters of strip.
- 1x Mean Well LRS-350-12
- Can provide up to 29Amps and because we only need 25,5Amps that’s a great fit!
The 12v 60LEDs/m ws2811 strip can be run with a single front injection for a single strip or up to 10m with a front + end injection however this is on the limits of what it can do and some brightness difference be observed because of how the strip functions (inefficient, quickly uses max power). For perfect distribution power should be injected front+back for each strip.
In theory the 30m can be run with 2,5Amps / 4Amps = 6,375 power injections however in practice when also using “middle” injections (can handle double the current) instead of only endpoint injections (as suggested above) this likely increases to 8 connections in total (counting 2 edge connections and 6 middle connections).
The above system can easily be expanded with more LED channels or more power connections if more LED strips get added.
Lots of individual LED bars/props (Disco setting)
In a setting like a Disco you might want to have a lot of smaller size props like 32 LED bars hanging from the ceiling. In this setting having a continuous data wires from one bar to the other would be prohibitive. Other solutions out there would run the same data wire to multiple bars but that limits being able to address all of them individually.
For this case we’re going to be using one of my favorite 12v ws2811 96LEDs/m bright LEDs. These are per 3 addressable but since this strip has 96LEDs/m it basically has 32 Addressable zones per meter making it on par with 30LEDs/m solutions but with a much more diffused stripe look.
Looking at my real-world power usage sheet we see that this strip uses 101w for the full 5m at 100% white or ~50w nominal usage (anything except full 100% white). Now normally I’d say calculate with nominal values but in this case let’s use the full power needed during 100% RGB white. 5m/16ft = 480 LEDs. So 101w/480 = 0,21w per LED. Since one 1m/3ft has 96LEDs that means it would use 96 * 0,21w = 20,2w. 20,2w/12v = 1,68Amps. So in this case each bar would use 1,68Amps each!
With 32 bars we’re talking about 1,68Amps x 32 = 53,76Amps. Although this is slightly above the recommended 50Amps continuous of a single normal version powerboard since we’re going to need 32 power ports (For easy and clean installation) we’re going to be using 2 powerboards anyway.
- 4x QuinLED-Dig-Octa Brainboard-32-8L
- With 4 boards you have 32 individual LED channels you can use
- We’ll be running 8 channels with 96LEDs each so the total is only 768LEDs in total per board allowing you to drive these bards with a very good framerate!
- With each output channel set to 33R mode it’s easy to use xConnect 3-wire cable from the controller to the props. With 12v there won’t be too much voltage drop either allowing up to 18 meter should be no problem data or power wise.
- With 4 boards you have 32 individual LED channels you can use
- 2x QuinLED-Dig-Octa Powerboard power-7
- Each board provides up to 50Amps continuous power and 16 fused output ports so 2 boards give you the 32 output ports needed.
- Since each prop can use a maximum of 1,68Amps I’d recommend populating each channel with a 2Amp fuse
- Each board provides up to 50Amps continuous power and 16 fused output ports so 2 boards give you the 32 output ports needed.
- 2x Mean Well LRS-350-12
- Can provide up to 29Amps each and with only 26,88Amps needed per powerboard at maximum intensity it’ll allow everything to run 100% RGB white without issue with a single power supply per powerboard
- 1x 5 port switch
- 1 port for uplink, 4 ports for the brainboards
The Power-7 powerboards have as downside that once stacked you can’t screw in cables anymore but if you screw in xConnect pigtails before stacking on the next one it should be no problem.
Using external software like xLights, Madrix or anything else that can output E1.31 or Artnet the bars can be used with all kinds of patterns and effects, treating the whole setup as a whole even though it’s using multiple brainboards.