DiyLightAnimation
Hardware => Lynx Smart String => Topic started by: t.jo13 on January 18, 2012,
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I was planning on getting into RGB next year, but my wife wants to add 2 more colors of icicles this year.(have 3 now) So here is the problem: I can do anything I want with the display as long as my wife gets her icicles. Now adding 2 more colors of good quality lights will cost $250.to 400. enclosed is a diagram of what I would like to do. I know i would have to inject power , and it will be alot of work. but can it be done? Now if it can, would I be able to group all the nodes so they just change to the coors I want or is there a limit? Is the chip 8 bit and 256 color? The colors I would want are white, blue, red and green. the coolwhite icicles would still have to be used
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I don't understand why you wouldnt be able to, there are just a couple of things you have to remember when it comes to Smart Strings..
Each "string" must have it's own SSC (Smart String controller). One string can NOT under any circumstances be longer than 128 nodes. The SSC can NOT be longer than (to be on the safe side) 8 feet from the first node on the string. You have to get a cat5 cable to each SSC
Apart from that, since each node is totally independant from any other node and can have it's colour/effect set to anything that you can think of (more or less).
I think it would be a pain in the buttski to sequence though :)
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If you are doing smart strings, it's 24 bit color. You can do any color you want per node... You could program them in string mode (all the same color), but that's boring... :)
You could make sequencing fancy color effects easier by sticking with a fixed pattern -say 1,3,1,5 then programming it as a 10x?? Matrix remembering that 1,2,5,&6 are the line with the others being the hanging ones...
RM
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The colors I would want are white, blue, red and green. the coolwhite icicles would still have to be used
You can get cool white from the SS nodes. In fact you can do almost any color in the RGB specturm.
http://www.colorspire.com/rgb-color-wheel/
Brian
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The colors I would want are white, blue, red and green. the coolwhite icicles would still have to be used
You can get cool white from the SS nodes. In fact you can do almost any color in the RGB specturm.
http://www.colorspire.com/rgb-color-wheel/
Brian
Nice link Brian - Certainly bookmarked that one !!
Mark - Georgia
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you can't get all of the colors from that color chart.
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Thanks for the link Brian.
Chris, I do not quite understand. Why can you not get all the colors with this, as you can put in up to 255 in each color and when dealing with a light spectrum I believe this works. Does this not give you all colors? I know that when printing you need cmyk but with light I thought that the true primary colors were Yellow, Mageta, Cyan or RGB opposite.
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try putting rgb into your rgb strips...
r 128
g 64
b 0
what color do you get?
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that's just one example that i know of
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you get a tan color
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in paint, it's brown, on a smart sting it is not brown
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That is interesting, with not having any SS I would have thought this would help.
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it works for most of it, that's one color that it doesn't do that i'm aware of (other than greys) but a lot of it does work.
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Chris,
Just wondering if you know off the top of your head if the three colors can produce a warm white instead of a cool white. My wife cannot stand the bright white that most of the LED's put off today and would rather the warm white.
Mark - Georgia
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i just tried rgb 255,255,64 give that a shot, it's a softer white
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ok, after playing around a bit more...
red 255
green 255
blue anywhere from 32-64 depending on how dirty (soft) you want it to look
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Just wondering if you know off the top of your head if the three colors can produce a warm white instead of a cool white.
This is a good write-up on "whiteness"...
http://planetpixelemporium.com/tutorialpages/light.html (http://planetpixelemporium.com/tutorialpages/light.html)
This is also helpful...
Warm White is 248, 245, 212
Antique White is 250, 235, 215
Of course you can play with the numbers for any color version you like
to find more colors this is a nice site http://www.art-paints.com/Paints/Acrylic/Jansen-Art/Warm-White/Warm-White.html
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Great find! Been looking for this type of info.
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that's a good read, Steve... in the case of pixel lights, they don't have much of a range in the dark scale (why i can't get brown) so the rgb numbers need to be tweaked a little to get the same color. kind of like having a high light curve...
the colors i previosly posted, i had to pull the blue color way down to get the light to even soften up.
remember, rgb in the computer world has 6 factors... we only get to play with three of them.
USE: Computer Christmas Lights
Setting
R X X
G X X
B X X
Hue X
Sat X
Lum X
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Would love to see what you come up with. I was thinking about this very thing, for the very same reason. The wife wants icicles, I want RGB and I thought would be a good compromise. Albeit an expensive one. I think for next year I am just converting the C9s to SS and we have to wait and see on the icicles.
Brian
I was planning on getting into RGB next year, but my wife wants to add 2 more colors of icicles this year.(have 3 now) So here is the problem: I can do anything I want with the display as long as my wife gets her icicles. Now adding 2 more colors of good quality lights will cost $250.to 400. enclosed is a diagram of what I would like to do. I know i would have to inject power , and it will be alot of work. but can it be done? Now if it can, would I be able to group all the nodes so they just change to the coors I want or is there a limit? Is the chip 8 bit and 256 color? The colors I would want are white, blue, red and green. the coolwhite icicles would still have to be used
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Thanks for the info guys, I will order sone strings as soon as the people in china are off holiday(jan 28th). Now if I recall reading on the forum I do believe S.Gase reduced the 128 string to 80 for better operation, and also I chose Lightshow pro to program Is that a good choice?
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I did have better success with 85 than I saw with 128... but in hindsight I think my experience is not very useful.
I had bought pixels in 2 batches... each batch had 20+ strings of 128. Inspecting them, they both looked waterproofed to the same degree and I thought they were all IP68 (new gen). Turns out that one batch was IP67 and the other batch was IP68. I found that IP67 is flat along the cylinder that holds the board/chip within the pixel. IP68 is fully-rounded. So my testing was done with an unknown combination of pixels. I did repairs because of malfunctioning pixels -- and when I did this I mixed in IP67 with IP68 strings, and vice-versa.
The other thing that I did that causes me to suspect my findings... I had my strings still in loops when I tried to burn them in (in my dry garage). After 6-7 hours they started acting flakey. When I cut them down to 85 nodes, they no longer acted flaky. I now suspect heat buildup from having 10 strings each in their own loops sitting on my shelf.
So, I have no proof that using 128 IP68 pixels, stretched out into a string will not give great results. Others have not had a problem.
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Steve in your particular case, you might have had a bad node that was flaking out with not enough power. by cutting them down to 85 nodes, might have provided more power to the nodes in that string? (kinda like RJ's resistor fix for the SSC)
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Steve in your particular case, you might have had a bad node that was flaking out with not enough power. by cutting them down to 85 nodes, might have provided more power to the nodes in that string? (kinda like RJ's resistor fix for the SSC)
Anything is possible... there were too many variables that I didn't understand initially.
I'm hoping that my plans to recondition my strings and other components will shed more light over my past issues.