LED light sculpture with teensy 3.2 and OctoWS2811 adapter

[tomshirm]

So the plan is to build this structure that has 14 vertical strips about a metre long spread out over a 4m wide rig. So far I’ve got the teensy connected to the adapter and this will happily run the test sketches so the LED are all functional (except for some power issues which I think I’ve figured out. I’m planning to run software like Glediator (or a video player depending on how the resolution looks) which is where I’m running into trouble.

Everything is happily talking to each other so far, the trouble I’m having is with screen configuration. I’ve currently wired the strips as a snake over the verticals and then within the sketches putting in my total led and number of LEDs per strip but this will not trigger any LEDs after the first initial strip. This is also happening with the other sketches with the OctoWS2811 library such as the fire animation. This will trigger the whole strip but only when I say my strip length is the total no of LED as opposed to what I want per column.

Am I wiring this the wrong way or am I setting up the sketch incorrectly? Also for future adaptations how would it work to have different strip lengths??

Happy to help others that are on the same journey, determined to get this thing working!!

 

[crees]

look at my http://megapixel.lighting project. Search here for megapixel too. It uses sACN and Jinx (like glediator). All the project does is provide you with a Shield board and you connect your teensy, wiznet and some components (octows2811 parts). Here is a couple matrix examples (zig zag) that this project controlled. The code link can be found on the megapixel site by the menu.

https://youtu.be/l3cA2Wv3P_k

https://youtu.be/hO5ZvEu6pyM

 

[tomshirm]

Looks great! Will definitely investigate further if this current scheme is a dead end! So is a matrix a zig zag, is that how generally the strips should be wired or is that something specific to your system, I don’t see where I’m going wrong as I don’t understand how if they were wired as parallel strips they wouldn’t all be the same! Or do you think my problem is more software based?

 

[crees]

In the controller world I have learned that you have two methods of handling parallel strips. Physically most people zigzag the strips. Because of this you come to two ways to solve this. One way and preferred way is to have zig zag strips be managed in software (glediator, jinx etc). Software has the ability to compensate this and help you number your pixels in reverse every other line (snakelines is also another term for zig zag) . The second way is to have the controller in loop code handle the zigzag. This is a little more complex but some of the matrix code may show you how its done.