Hello All,
I originally bought an AllPixel on the first Kickstarter and I'm very
excited to see Maniacal Labs still going strong.
Thanks! 
I recently bought my first home in North Carolina and would to line my
roof eaves and porches with outdoor LED strips and control them using an
AllPixel. The concept look like this: https://imgur.com/a/M4uRR
Very cool. I did just my front porch, but that looks even cooler. Biggest
problem you'll have there is where to run all the power and control wires.
And where to put the actual power supplies. For mine, I used a NEMA rated
box and then used "cable glands" to run the cables out of the box. You want
to keep your power runs as short as possible.
I'm hoping y'all could help me with the following questions:
a) Am I insane and this is to difficult to pull off?
It's all relative. Not insane. It would be insanely cool. Difficult, yes...
impossible, no. Just needs planning.
b) Can and AllPixel or PiPixel control all of these LED strips? Do I need
multiple devices?
Yes. Either could... The biggest problem you'll have is that you will end
up with basically multiple "zones" if you do it like in the above link.
Ok... first big question. Do you want control over each individual pixel or
do you just want the entire strips to all be the same color along the whole
length??
If the first, then yeah, definitely going to need multiple zones and I'd
actually have a PiZero W and PiPixel for each zone. we'd then have to
coordinate those in software. Tiny bit complicated, but definitely doable.
If you just want everything to be the same color (which is what you linked
to shows) or even just all of one zone to be the same color then the
AllPixel or PiPixel can't really help you but you'll also save yourself a
boatload of money... Let me explain.
2 types of LED strips. Digital and Analog. Digital (like WS2812, NeoPixel,
DotStar, APA102, LPD8806, etc) get all the love because everyone sees the
cool things people make where every pixel is controllable. But this are A)
expensive and B) terrible for architectural lighting. Absolutely terrible!
And it's because each pixel is controlled. So, if you do
Red/Green/Red/Green/Red/Green for christmas... guess what, you're house
won't be christmasy, it will be Halloween, because your house will now be
orange! When you have the lights setup in the eaves like that the colors
just blend and you need much more separation than you will get. This is
fixable in BiblioPixel (just tell it each "pixel" is 10 actual pixels wide
or similar) but it's a waste of money. One solution is, however, that they
sell 12V and 24V digital strips where each logical "pixel" is actually 3 to
6 physical LEDs all controlled by the same control chip. So now you have
those really wide pixels and your Red/Green christmas pattern actually
looks right. If you want to be able to have patterns run along each section
(instead of all being one color) don't even *think* about getting 5V
strips. You absolutely need the 12 or 24V variety. It's what I have and
they are great. However!!
If you want every section to be one color... absolutely go analog. Analog
strips are "dumb" in that they don't have control chips and instead
typically still have 4 wires, but those wires are 12/24V power and the Red
Ground, Green Ground, Blue Ground. You drive these by a power MOSFET and a
PWM signal and the entire strip is all the same color. They are also MUCH
cheaper.
We actually designed a device that connects to these strips and makes them
into one giant "digital" pixel so that you can easily control them from a
Pi or AllPixel without needing to worry about all the MOSFET and PWM
stuff. It's open source, so could still make some if you wanted, even
though we never sold it.
Given it looks like you want to do the whole house, I'd go analog. It will
cost about 25% as much. Either way, I'd do 24V strips because they are
much, much easier to power long runs. You could, with the analog ones even
make each one a single "pixel" and have each section controllable and still
be able to do cool patterns. Hardest part would be running the signal
between each... but it's doable and then you could control the whole thing
from a single Pi or AllPixel.
c) Is it possible to buy "weatherproof" programable RGB strips and if so
does anyone have any recommendations?
Yup, and you found it See above regarding a box to hold the power and
such.
···
On Sat, Oct 21, 2017 at 11:46 PM, William Clark <clark.d.william@gmail.com> wrote:
I really appreciate any help and advices.
-William
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I’m 95% sure you bought analog LEDs not digital. Those are not compatible with the AllPixel. Even for the digital type, we don’t support strips with a separate white channel (the RGBW type), just RGB.