re: Permanently installed LED "Christmas" lights.

About 1 week into the holidays and the outside lights are working well. I have them turn on at sunset every night via an Alexa routine (although I could easily do the same with the macro settings in the WLED firmware).

I have a set of animations going that I and, more importantly, the wife like. The kid was able to help me design some of them using his tablet.

I'll say this about the WLED Alexa integration. It's been hit or miss over the last week. There are 2 or 3 NODEMCUs that I have that Alexa couldn't find. However doing some research on the subject, I think the issue is on Amazon's end, not WLED's end. If you are banking on that connection, order a few extra NodeMCU's just to make sure you get one that connects. In order to make discovery work, I had to reboot most of the Echo Dots in the house and then run discovery ASAP.

Also, I ended up giving most of mine a static Ip address and turning off sleep mode as the Alexa app as "losing them" and showing them as unresponsive even tho they were still visible in the WLED app. Again, I think it's an issue with the alexa protocol and not the WLED software (Hue users were reporting the same issues and WLED emulates a hue bulb).

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have you thought about putting ESPixelstick firmware on esps and run xlights? thats what im going to do.

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NOt this year. I just don't have enough lights right now.

Maybe next year if I go crazy.

So this thread got me started down this path for my house. It took awhile to get everything assembled, especially with the height of my house, but I finally finished. I haven't really had a chance to adjust segments in WLED and I need to figure out the best animations, but overall I'm happy with the end result.

Excellent.

Nice work on the curve on the entrance foyer.

So I'm late to the game with all this, and I almost put it off until next year because there seemed to be an LED shortage for a couple weeks there. But I bit the bullet and ordered all the stuff last week. The channel came in earlier today, so I went ahead and put it on. Starting small, just 40' across the front of the house, only took about an hour.

My wire came in after dark, so I just spent a while building out my controller. I already had a spare nodemcu, so I'm using that instead of a dig-uno. I've got the nodemcu output hooked directly to the data wire with no level shifter, and it works fine over a few feet of wire, but I'm worried about when I install it and try to use ~30' of 18 gauge. I've never made one before, but I have all the parts to make a level shifter, and they look pretty simple so I guess I can do that if I have trouble.

Hey RC,

I had a question for you. How's you wire everything? Personally, I did 1 big run from the south side of my house to the north, I only used 1 data wire. I have just under 1,000 LED in the system. The entire pixel run is about 33 meters.

Did you do 1 big run or break them up into segments have have the 9 diguno's run each section? As I said, just curious. Was trying to figure how your wired everything.

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Hey RC,

I had a question for you. How's you wire everything? Personally, I did 1 big run from the south side of my house to the north, I only used 1 data wire. I have just under 1,000 LED in the system. The entire pixel run is about 33 meters.

Did you do 1 big run or break them up into segments have have the 9 diguno's run each section? As I said, just curious. Was trying to figure how your wired everything.

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I started with one long run but ended up using 2 digunos. My line starts at the tower on the right and goes left, but because of where I place the power supply and controller, I had to run the wires about 60-70 feet. It still worked fine, but I found that if I crank up the power then everything started to glitch.

I did a second power supply to inject power to the part that is around the main part of the house, so I ended up just adding the second diguno to control that part. It's a much shorter intial wire run and I can crank the brightness to full without any issue there. Other than the brightness issue, I also noticed that the animations seemed to lag a little when I had 1 controller for all 1200 or so LEDs.

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So I ended up using *much* more wire than I was anticipating, about 80' of 18 gauge from my controller to the first LED, and it works!

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I have about 60' of 18 awg from the controller to the first pixel with no problems. I am using a logic level shifter though. I could have save myself a ton a trouble on the install though if I would have known about the "reverse segment" toggle in the WLED software. As I said above, I started on the south side of my house and ran 3 conductor 18 awg out of the garage, into the attic, out through the soffits and up and over the top of the garage peak. I could have set up two segments and made 1 data connection to each and saved about 40-50' of wire. It was a pain getting the 18 AWG to fit in the channels. I ended up having to hot glue it on top of the LED strips in a lot of spots. IF I would have spilt into two sections. I then could have used 2 stand wire for power injection only and saved a lot of install hassle. Of course I could have just run the wire through the attic to the south side soffit. But I wanted to be able to pull everything down in one shot if I needed too.

FWIW I have 992 LEDS online (33 M).

This wont really help connecting strip to strip, but for wire runs, these look to be really useful.

Soldery Melty Connectors