Yesterday I made a garland for the window all day. It took a lot of time to figure out how to fix and connect the pieces of the garland.
At the 11.11 sale, I defeated my toad and bought these garlands with addressable LEDs.
With all the discounts and coupons, each 50 LED string cost me $ 6.47 (they are now cost $ 8.14).
LEDs in such a garland shine strictly in one direction, so the question arose of how to fix a couple of dozen vertical "threads" so that they would look at the street. Some people stick them on the glass, but this is not our option. I came up with the following: top and bottom cable ducts 25x16. In the upper channel, grooves are cut into which the flat wire of the garland is inserted. There are three holes in the lower channel for extension wires soldered to the lower LED of each string.
In order to drill these holes, I made a template from an aluminum corner.
After several unsuccessful attempts to exactly drill three holes of 2 mm in a row (well, yes, the arms are crooked), I remembered that I have a small homemade drilling machine that I bought once on radio market.
With his help, the template was made and the second question arose - how to connect the threads of the garland so that the garland does not twist. You need to understand that it will not work to leave the standard wires between the threads - they are only 10 cm long and, taking into account the bends, the threads will be at a distance of no more than 6 cm from each other, which is very small. At first, I wanted to solder the standard wires from both the upper and lower thread LEDs and solder some hard wires or loops. Then I decided that the top wire could be left as standard.
Such garlands consume a lot (100 LEDs up to 2.5 amperes) and it is necessary to provide power along the entire length of the garland without losses on the wires. To do this, I laid two single-core wires in the lower channel (I got them by tearing the TU-shny cable PUNP 3x1.5, the real cross-section of the wires of which turned out to be about 1 mm²). So that the wire is whole in the right places, the insulation is removed from it with a knife and the power wires from each thread are soldered to it. There is no need to isolate these soldering points, since the points of connection to the plus and minus are separated to the sides.
On top of the threads, the power wires are not connected anywhere. Only data lines are connected.
The upper cable channel is fixed with three self-tapping screws, the lower one simply hangs on the garlands, providing their tension.
So far, the simplest controller SP002E is connected to the garland (https://ammo1.livejournal.com/1193162.html). When I finish the second part of the garland, I will try to make an Arduino controller according to the project GyverPanelWiFi or just connect the Kitls controller (https://ammo1.livejournal.com/1106594.html).
P.S. By the way, I talked to the author of Kitls today. Over the year there are many changes and new firmware that even supports such "bells and whistles" as capturing effects from a line of any video: https://youtu.be/LABwCqvw7pY.
P.P.S. I perfectly understand that many will be surprised why waste time and money on such nonsense. The answer is simple: I just want it :).
© 2020, Alexey Nadezhin
For ten years I have been writing every day about technology, discounts, places of interest and events. Read my blog on the site ammo1.ru, in LJ, Zen, Mirtesen.
My projects:
Lamptest.ru. I test LED lamps and help figure out which ones are good and which are not so good.
Elerus.ru. I collect information about domestic electronic devices for personal use and share it.
You can contact me in Telegram @ ammo1 and by mail [email protected].