Happy Easter!

Thank you all for the complements.

angus40 said:
Are you using the square style pixels on this grid ?
Click to expand...

No, actually these are just regular 5V WS2811 60/m LED strip cut apart and then spaced out to 3.5 inch spacing using strands of cat3 (same wire as cat5, just less effort to unwind them). It was somewhat tedious, but much less expensive to cover a larger area this way. (later I did find a place that actually makes LED strip with 10 cm spacing, but the DIY approach cost less money). Then I put the pixels back in silicon tubes and when I mounted them I pointed them backwards so they act like miniature spot lights shining onto the garage door surface.

Gdoor-pixels-P1330253.jpg Gdoor-strips-P1330258.jpg Gdoor-mounted-P1330280.jpg

This was a "technology refresh" of an earlier version which is described here:
http://downloads.eshepherdsoflight.com/Howidid-DumbRGBPixelGrid.pdf

I prefer this style of gdoor grid because it's practically invisible in the daytime from several feet away (and totally invisible hardware at night), and the garage door is still operational (even when the lights are running). This time around, I used WS2811 instead of chipiplexed LEDs. The cut up pieces of LED strip make great little PCBettes, and were a lot easier to work with than bare LEDs. I also mounted the controller and power supply on the back side of the door this time, which made the front appearance a lot cleaner than how I did it the first time around.

don
 
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djulien said:
Thank you all for the complements.



No, actually these are just regular 5V WS2811 60/m LED strip cut apart and then spaced out to 3.5 inch spacing using strands of cat3 (same wire as cat5, just less effort to unwind them). It was somewhat tedious, but much less expensive to cover a larger area this way. (later I did find a place that actually makes LED strip with 10 cm spacing, but the DIY approach cost less money). Then I put the pixels back in silicon tubes and when I mounted them I pointed them backwards so they act like miniature spot lights shining onto the garage door surface.

View attachment 23876 View attachment 23877 View attachment 23878

This was a "technology refresh" of an earlier version which is described here:
http://downloads.eshepherdsoflight.com/Howidid-DumbRGBPixelGrid.pdf

I prefer this style of gdoor grid because it's practically invisible in the daytime from several feet away (and totally invisible hardware at night), and the garage door is still operational (even when the lights are running). This time around, I used WS2811 instead of chipiplexed LEDs. The cut up pieces of LED strip make great little PCBettes, and were a lot easier to work with than bare LEDs. I also mounted the controller and power supply on the back side of the door this time, which made the front appearance a lot cleaner than how I did it the first time around.

don
Click to expand...

Wow , that is a ton of work/time invested to create that grid . Very creative Don . I guess I should have expected this coming from you though . :)

I could not figure out how the light was so square in shape without spillage . awesome idea.
 
angus40 said:
I could not figure out how the light was so square in shape without spillage
Click to expand...

I have the stand-offs set so that the pixels will overlap slightly when they are on full intensity, but if they are dimmer then there is a slight gap. This way I can control whether they run together at the edges or not, to give a slightly different look to it (I can also adjust the standoffs manually if needed). When the colors blend at the edges, it makes the graphics look less blocky even though this is a low-res grid.

budude said:
I've got a whole pile of them little varmints from my star build
Click to expand...

They also make handy testers, or even "front panel" devices - since they only take 1 I/O pin to run they don't take much extra hardware, just a spare I/O pin.

don
 
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