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Controller to fixture/prop distance


zvacman

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Hi everyone!

Now that the season has ended, the dust is settled, and everything is down and stored away we now look to next year.  This past year was my first with pixels and all in all it went fairly well. I had a lot of rogue pixels flashing at about 5% brightness all over the place without any rhyme or reason. I need to figure out why, suggestions are welcome of course. My real question at this time is a distance question. I read somewhere recently that the Falcon is able to send power and signal significantly further than other pixel controllers, the figure I saw was 400'. That is much further than I need, but I'd like 40'-50'. I had a run that was about 30' away this year and even with a null pixel installed I ended up with bad results. This was a wreath with 100 pixels and there were a lot of them flashing without being told to do anything. Any guidance is, as always appreciated.

Z

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  • 2 weeks later...

I think the 400' that you saw was for either the DMX outputs or for the differential daughter board. There can be many different things to troubleshoot. A couple of questions first.

Which pixel type were you using? Some pixels can handle longer data runs. You might need to put a second null pixel so that there 10' apart

What is the voltage of the pixel? 5v or 12v . You will get longer distances with 12V

Where is the power coming from? Is the power coming from the controller or do you have power close to the wreath? If it's from the controller What is the wire gauge of the cable? You would have to take into consideration voltage drop.

Based on one pixel that Ray Wu sells. 1 pixel consumes .72W X 100 pixels = 72W  / 12V = 6A  Now if you take that info & put it into a voltage drop calculator ( I'm also basing this on 20 gauge wire which is the standard ). You would get a drop of 30.5% Or to say that at the end of your 30' you would only have 8.34V

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