The TC nodes are having an extreme failure period. The 2811s have a voltage regulator that is burning up because of high voltage. You will not be able to run Technicolor nodes with an ATX power supply! Actually probably won't be able to run them with any power supply for this year!
I understand the voltage regulator issue and that the WS2811 is constant current, but I've been wondering if the effect could be reduced by lowering overall current as well. For instance, is the failure rate higher if you run with white or mixed colors versus just using the primary red, green, or blue individually since the total current through the voltage regulator would potentially be only 1/3 of an all white draw.
I'm crossing my fingers, but I've burned mine in via an Active Hub and SSC v4 for approximately 24 hours and haven't had a single pixel die on me during testing. This is using an xLights test sequence, mainly the A-B-C red-green-blue color cycle, but I also let them run 6-8 hours in 'mixed colors' mode the first day.
How much time have people had on their pixels before they started seeing issues?
I'm also curious if anyone is reporting success without any issues. Normally people don't speak up if things are running fine.
Since I've heard some people talk about turning their voltage down to 10V, I've also considered the possibility of picking up an adjustable power supply and doing my own 10V power injection right after the Active Hub. I believe the SSC would handle the 10V power input just fine since it has it's own 7805 chip for the logic on board and the input voltage is just passed through to the pixels. For my small set of 8 strings and the fact that I have the SSC's sitting in the same battery box as the active hub (since I don't have my zeus yet), I think this would be easy enough for me to do. Any thoughts?