I got 1/2 my strands from Ray last week, other half just shipped - overall, the quality is MUCH improved over the test strands from early this summer. The water proofing looks spectacular in my shipment - maybe I got lucky, but I've only found a couple of nodes that might need a little plastidip love. All of my other nodes have this epoxy type stuff completely covering the board and wires, etc. Overall, I'm pretty happy.
Here are my two issues - 1.) running through the test sequence (and I've let them run for 48 hours at this point), the only rainbox coloration I get on 5 of the strands is at the end of the pixel strands. Perhaps the last few nodes out of 128. This is happening pretty consistently on 5 out of 6 strands. On a couple of the strands, it's only the last pixel, and on some cycles it's not impacted at all. On other strands it's the last 8 - 10 during the green and blue colors.
I'm thinking I might just convert these strands to 100 node strands and be done with it. On 5 / 6 strands, it's never impacting the first 100 nodes. Thoughts?
2.) I've got one strand that approximately 1/2 in, every 10 - 12 cycles, I'll get a slow rainbow color change. For instance, it will slowly fade from red to green over 50 pixels or so. I'm thinking I'll try trimming it down to 100 nodes as well to see if it impacts anything?
In testing, (just to see what would happen), I did confirm lots of rainbox effects after the white color when trying to use 75' of cat-5 on the 128 node strand. My assumption is that the white node caused the voltage to drop sufficiently that the next color change was not properly processed. The Red and Green would produce rainbow effects (lots on red, fewer on green) and perfect blue and white. Then the voltage would likely drop with the high current needs of white and the cycle would repeat. Just a little info if anyone was wondering how far you can run the cables. 50' seems to be the absolute limit for 128 node, and if you have a lot of white in your show, I'd question that.
