[frikk]

I've been building hobby LED art projects with WLED (exclusively built on the ESP32 platform). It's been a blast. These little boards are so powerful and the open source community continues to amaze me.

My preferred controller platform is of the QuinLED line - comes with power distribution, voltage regulators, fat copper lines, configurable data-line resistors, and smart auxiliary hardware support all for an affordable $30-$50 per controller. (quinled.info)

<https://kno.wled.ge/> - WLED homepage and probably my favorite clever URL of all time.

[wolvoleo]

I do a lot of LED projects too but I just use ws2812s. What do you need the controller for? Large brightness perhaps? Just curious.

[ssl-3]

There's lots of ways to drive LEDs.

WS2812 with any ESP32 board is one way, and that's a perfectly fine way; individual addressable LEDs sure are neat as hell. Amazing stuff can be done with them. And as you already know, a Chinese ESP32 dev kit costing $2 is enough to do ~all the things with this on the controller side. :)

But there's other ways, too. At perhaps its simplest: Maybe RGB isn't your bag, and you just want groups (which could be strips or any other shape) of all one color that are smoothly-controllable with WLED.

This is electrically simpler: While individual WS2812 pixels each work as a little computer-brain repeater for a serial bus, a group of dumb LEDs can be as simple as just being a group of dumb LEDs. And that's easy; perhaps as easy as one PWM channel.

Or maybe it's more complex: Maybe the goal is something like a par can that shines RGBAW all in one direction. Now we need 5 PWM channels.

Anyway, the power electronics for doing PWM with dumb LEDs can be built or they can be bought, but they need to exist and to live somewhere.

QuinnLED sells devices with power electronics in packages ranging from bare boards, to complete units with metal housings that have power and real ethernet on one side of the box and LED outputs on the other side.

Since skillsets and willingness to go full-DIY vary, they present pretty nice range of options.

One box I just looked at, the QuinLED An-Penta-Plus: It's a box that has 5 channels of PWM, does up to 10A per channel, or up to 30A combined per box -- at up to 48VDC.

That's [up to] 30*48=1440 Watts of LED, which is getting in the realm of the silly. But environment/projects come in all sizes, people do silly things with LEDs sometimes, and that's all perfectly OK. WLED projects don't have to be small. :)

[wolvoleo]

I know how WS2812's work :) Like I said I use them.

My question was why use bare LEDs with a separate PWM controller like QuinnLED instead of WS2812. But yes size could be an issue. Long strings of WS2812 tend to get slow and if they all need to do the same thing at the same time it's ok.

[ssl-3]

Yes, but I mean: WS2812 and its other addressable friends aren't the whole story in LED lighting, and neither is RGB.

Maybe my project involves developing automatically-adjustable color temperature indirect lighting for a semi-permanent exhibit space, where the color temperature is based on that of the light cascading in through the glass windows during the day and softening things to a low color temperature at night.

That space doesn't ever need to be colorful, but it does need to be bright. And while adjustable CT lighting does exist in the commercially-available form, perhaps there's nothing off-the-shelf that fits this space so I have to DIY parts of it.

And maybe doing good stuff with WLED is already a skill that I have, so I want to use WLED.

Hardware-wise, I can get there with dense parallel strips of warm and cool white LEDs with a good color rendering index from vendors like BTF. I'll already have a lot of work ahead of me with the design and installation challenges (like managing heat, power distribution, and diffusion). I can reduce the work required by driving it with a pre-fab controller from QuinnLED.

And no aspect of this project needs colors other than two shades of white that are carefully mixed together, and none of it needs things to be pixel-addressable. It's not that WS2812 is slow (nothing here needs to be fast); it's that the advantages of WS2812 aren't wanted or useful.

Including extra features detracts from the main goal, and isn't KISS. :)

So instead, dumb LEDs can make sense. They don't have to be smart.

---

Or: Maybe my project wants density, instead. Maybe it involves a carnival attraction, and wants aspects of something like an Atomic 3000 LED from Martin[1]: https://www.martin.com/en-US/products/atomic-3000-led

Those are easy-enough to buy, but they're ~$4,000 each and that's way out of my budget.

Besides, they talk DMX instead of WLED, and DMX is a very different universe. WS2812 is straight out, just because WS2812 in any form lacks the density required for the intensity desired.

So I'll have to come up with something -- maybe I can refit a Chinese "UFO light" that runs on 36 or 48VDC or something internally, if I can find one, so as to reduce it to being just a collection of dumb LEDs.

And then, again, I'll need a controller for whatever I come up with.

I may just buy a controller for those dumb LEDs from QuinnLED for $40 -- I certainly can't build a box like that for this kind of price.

[1]: I was in front of a row of these at a Nine Inch Nails concert several months ago. Their use was very conservative until the very end -- at which point I felt like the intensity of the strobe effects was melting a part of my brain. The flashes were the brightest white imaginable, but the after-images were a bizarre and murky background haze of red and blue that lacked a definite source. 10/10, don't try this at home.

[gedy]

WLED is a system that runs on the ESP32 for some cool capabilities to drive the ws2812s, OP linked above.

[wolvoleo]

Yes but these don't need controller hardware. The OP is using a dedicated controller and I was asking why.

[leptons]

WS2812 absolutely need a controller, without one they would simply not light up.

[wolvoleo]

I mean a power controller. This is part of every WS2812 itself but with regular LEDs (be it RGB or not) you need power drivers for it, which I call the 'controller' too. You need to drive them at a certain amperage, then PWM them to get the right brightness. But with WS2812 you don't need to mess with power driver circuitry the OP mentioned. You just chain them to a microcontroller pin.

It was probably my use of the word 'controller' that is a bit confusing.

[leptons]

The comment you replied to above references WLED running on an ESP32, which has nothing to do with power. A "power controller" is not a widely used term in the world of addressable LEDs. A "power supply" is a far more common term, and has little to practically nothing to do with "controlling" the LEDs.

[gedy]

Maybe not following, but I buy strips of WS2812 and if I wanted to for them to turn on and, say, display a rainbow, I need something to drive that. Not USB from another device, e.g. standalone.

[wolvoleo]

Yes but as far as I understand the OP is not doing that, they are just using raw LEDs with power drivers and the whole shebang that is so nicely built into the ws2812s for us. Otherwise they wouldn't need these components they're talking about.

I just connect them to a microcontroller pin and be done with it. I power them separately off a power bank (my LEDs are almost always worn, if they are static I just use an off-the-shelf 5V supply).

[poyu]

Probably the scale and usability of things. It's different if you're controlling 100 LEDs vs 5,000.

[wolvoleo]

Yeah exactly that's what I was wondering about.

I use a few hundred at most and in those cases I just feed power at several points in the chain to reduce resistive losses in the wiring. But yeah I'm kinda interested what kind of huge installations would need that and how they work.

[GitPushOrigin]

What kinds of hardware are you using? I'm curious what LEDS/matrices you're buying? And also which controller from QuinLED you have? I've recently been having a lot of fun with some HUB75 displays and am interested in exploring other options and projects.

[stragies]

cr.yp.to/ is also a pretty cool URL, and has been around for a looong time