How do you layout/power your mini trees?

S

szaske

Member
I'm considering buying 8 of the HolidayCoro Hexatree's and I have a question for you all about how you lay them out. But I'm a bit worried about the waterproof-ness of their design. I've only used the waterproof connectors on my pixels and the HolidayCoro design uses a design that use a Cat5 cable for power and signal. It doesn't look very waterproof to me. Can anyone tell me if they've used this design and had problems (or not) with water?

Also they don't explain how to daisy-chain the Mini trees together, so my second question is how have you connected/powered a set of these trees? I plan to drive them from a Sandevices 682. I'm worried that having 8 of them daisy chained together would cause the last ones to be noticably dimmer. How many of these have you hooked together in series?

-=Steve
 
For individual WS2811 12MM 5V pixels I inject power every 50 pixels (I tried 100 but I did see a little bit of a pink tint on the last couple bulbs). For the 12V versions I have found that injection every 100 pixels works ok. The next thing to worry about is the max number of pixels your 682 can support on a single string. I don't have a 682 so I cant comment on this. My PX1s handle 200 pixels with no issues.
 
An e682 Controller can handle 2000 Pixels. That many pixels will require two (2) 350 Watt Power Supplies (PS). The e682 is designed to accept two PWs, and the box built by Jim at Sandevices is well built and holds everything (e682 & PWs) watertight and securely. He doesn't recommend any more than that.

A good rule of thumb is 3 Watts per R/G/B Pixel. Hope this helped.
 
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My Mini Trees, (which are not HC) use 55 pixels per tree. I put a DC-DC converter at the base of every tree and feed them from a single 24vdc supply. All wet location rated. I have 12 of them and they span about 40' or there abouts.
 
Hi XMAS Wizard, first I've heard of the enclosure Jim has available. I don't see it on the sandevices products page. Do you happen to have a link?

Sorry to hijack the thread but I couldn't resist.

Mark
 
I am using the medium mini trees from Boscoyo Studios. I have 60 WS2811 12v nodes in each. I put waterproof connectors on both ends of the strings and have about 24"+ of slack on each end. The power goes into one at the bottom and then comes down to the base on the 24" end connector which then connects to the next tree. I will only be running two trees, 120 nodes per connection, usng Falcon controllers. I was concerned about the 48" gap between the last pixel of the first tree and the first pixel of the second tree, but seems to work just fine. Fortunately by trees are only 24 - 30 inches apart.
 
XMAS WIZARD said:
A good rule of thumb is 3 Watts per R/G/B Pixel. Hope this helped.
Click to expand...

Hmm. My 12mm 5v bullet pixels draw just under 0.06A per pixel at full white. This turns into 0.06A x 5V = 0.3W

I would say the rule of thumb would be 0.3W/12mm WS2811 pixel. However, this number may not be the same for other types of pixels. You need to be aware of the type of pixel you are using when making these calculations.
 
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