Building matrix wall, which ribbons?

[brichi]

So i am thinking of building a small matrix wall for my front door off a pixie16, should i use the regular CCR (3led per pixel) strings or look for strips where i control each and every LED?  thanks for any input

Edited January 4, 2017 by brichi

[tomsusie]

It sounds like your confusing dumb & smart pixels/ribbons.  The regular CCR (ribbons) and CCB/CCP (bulbs/pixels) come in two varieties.  Dumb (you control the string as a whole -- all red, all blue, etc).  Smart (you control each "bulb").  With smart you can make each bulb any color you want so you can have red, orange, green,blue, etc one after the other or you can make them all the same.  It has much greater flexiblity in what you want to do.  Depending on what you want to display on your matrix would have a lot in determining which type you should use.  If you're doing pictures and graphics with multiple colors you want to go with smart version.  If just text than dumb might work alright.  If money is not an object I would suggest going with the smart versions because you have greater flexibility.  Hope that helps.

[brichi]

CCRII is smart and you cannot control each individual bulb though, just each individual pixel (3 bulbs in a pixel)

 

http://store.lightorama.com/cocoriiic.html

 

Quote

Smart (you control each "bulb")

no you can't though, you can control each pixel (3 "bulbs)

Edited January 4, 2017 by brichi

[BMurray]

Smart strips or CCRs... 

• Total LEDs per Strip: 150 of 5mm x 5mm (5050) RGB LED Lights
• Total Individually Controllable Sections per Strip: 50 Sections (10 per meter) - each 4" in length, contain 3 RGB LED lights per section
• Total DMX channels required: 150 DMX Channels (50 sections, each with three channels - Red, Green, Blue

Dumb strips will have the same amount of LEDs but will only be (3)  channels of RGB  vs (150)  channels for smart strips or CCRs.. The whole strip can be changed ONLY one color at a time. 

Smart pixels or bulbs (indvidually called a "node") ... 

• Total LEDs per node: 3 (Red, Green, Blue)
• Total LED nodes per string: 50
• Total DMX channels required per string: 150 DMX Channels

Dumb strips will NOT allow you to do "text"   as Tomsusie stated above

Edited January 4, 2017 by BMurray

[brichi]

correct, I know not to do dumb strips, that would be dumb

so for a matrix screen would you do a CCR ribbon which is 3 nodes per pixel or a strip like this where you can individually control each node

a CCR has 150 nodes (individual bulbs) but you can only control individually 50 of them (pixels) so the first 3 nodes are 1 color, then ext 3 nodes are a different and so on but the strip i posted above you can literally have every node its own color similar to an LED tv

[k6ccc]

I think all of you were missing his point.  He was asking about a smart strip that has one RGB LED per pixel vs smart strip that has three RGB LEDs per pixel (the way a CCR (and most other 12 volt strips) do it).  Personally I have never seen a 12V smart strip that was not three RGB LEDs per pixel.  That does not mean that they don't exist, but I have never seen one.  However every 5V smart strip that I have ever seen has one RGB LED per pixel.  I am using both for different purposes in my display.

Although lots of people have built a matrix from CCRs (three RGB LEDs per pixel), I would think that having one RGB LED per pixel would look better.  You would want to have the LED density similar to the CCR, and not one pixel for every four inches.  Of course it would require more channels for the same number of LEDs.  For example, if you were to build a 16 x 50 matrix using CCRs, it would require 800 pixels and have 2400 RGB LEDs.  To get the same number of LEDs with one LED per pixel strip, would require 2400 pixels.

 

[BMurray]

Yes,  K6ccc they do 

Holiday Coro sells a strip that has 60 RGB lights per meter wth a total of 300 pixels for a whopping 900 channels per strip. The strips run off a different protocol but states it is compatible  with WS2811 and it uses 72 watts of power per strip (wow)  so depending g on how many strips are used in matrix you can use A LOT of power supplies.  Plus if a pixel goes bad it would very hard to replace.  AND they are quite expensive at 3 to 4 times the cost of a regular strip

[brichi]

awesome, thanks for the info guys!