Need to control dumb LED strings on the other side of the street

D

derfnivrag

New member
My neighbor across the street has quite a few dumb LEDs, and wanted to know if I can link his lights to the show. It is on the other side of the street, so the only way would be by WiFi. He has five trees, so five channels. Unless there is a way to do this with ESPixelsticks, I probably don't have time to order something and set it up for this year. I do have two ESPixelsticks unused. I also have an 8 channel solid state relay board available. Any ideas that are not too difficult?
 
Your are in luck if you have a few spare bullet or square node pixels !!
Dissect a pixel by carefully removing the rgb led and casing . On the end of the pixel pcb you will have your r,g,b to drive the dumb rgb elements . This is great for simplicity in a pinch .

I forgot to add , from there you will need a n-channel mosfet for each r,g and b channel if driving heavy current loads.
Toss in a 10k resistor for each gate of the mosfet to pull it low and you are good to go .

If your spare pixels are 12v , all the better .
Hope this helps .
 
Last edited:
Yes you can use the pixel sticks if you want to transmit E1.31 data on a wifi network or set them up as an FPP remote and have them play data from an SD card.
 
derfnivrag said:
My neighbor across the street has quite a few dumb LEDs, and wanted to know if I can link his lights to the show. It is on the other side of the street, so the only way would be by WiFi. He has five trees, so five channels. Unless there is a way to do this with ESPixelsticks, I probably don't have time to order something and set it up for this year. I do have two ESPixelsticks unused. I also have an 8 channel solid state relay board available. Any ideas that are not too difficult?
Click to expand...

Are they DC lights? What SSR board do you have? There's an outstanding pull request that adds PWM to the relay support that was added in 4.0, but we haven't been able to test it yet as I don't have a board - https://github.com/forkineye/ESPixelStick/pull/376. I could merge it if you want to hack together a controller to the SSR board and test it. Should be as simple as jumping some pins from a Wemos module depending on the SSR board.
 
The strings are the normal AC light strings with single color LED bulbs, mostly of the GE line. The relay board I have is a SainSmart 8 channel solid state relay board. I just want to be able to turn an element (tree) on/off. No dimming.

I am a novice when it comes to "hacking" a controller to the board. I would love to try it, worst case is I cause a $35 fire. If you are willing to walk me through this, I am game.

Thanks!
 
I have quite a few bullet pixels that can be sacrificed. The LED strings I want to drive are the typical AC strings you get from retail stores. I just want to be able to turn a tree on/off. Five trees, so an 8 channel SainSmart Solid State relay board would easily drive them.
 
I should have been more descriptive. The dumb LED strings are AC, like you get from a retail store. I have five trees I want to be able to turn on/off. I have a SainSmart 8 channel solid state relay board available. So, how do I send a signal by WiFi across the street, and tell the relays to open/close?

Thanks!
 
Thanks! I really appreciate it. Someday I am going to have to take the time to learn a lot more about this stuff. I generally think of the controllers as black boxes that I connect things to, and they magically make lights happen.
 
The ESP also has the ability to output Renard data stream. That means you can connect a Renard SS(your favorite number) using the ESP to sync with the show across the street.
 
I am the only one who ever recommends these bad boys, but I use RFM69 arduino shields from Elecrow to go long distances:

https://www.elecrow.com/rfm69-shield.html

They can work on 315MHz and have much longer range than Wifi. They just don't play too nicely with a FPP. You're basically transmitting 1's and 0's across the street and telling the receiver to start their own sequence on their own. Of course, any Wifi range extension that reaches that far will be better--if you can do it.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top