I am working on a lighting project for my BANNED. My vision is to have 12 of the 60 LED per meter NeoPixel strips hanging from the ceiling. These strips would hang in a 4 by 3 grid with 2 meter spacing. A have made a rough sketch of my vision here. This project is very similar to the Immersion art project posted by Adafruit customer ramien
Before I set out to do this, I have a few questions:
- Is there a library that allows the Mega 2560 to communicate to multiple strips using multiple output pins? I ask this because it will be a real pain to run the output of one strand back up the strip, across the ceiling, and to the input of the next strip. I am worried about clutter as well as the signal losing strength. Do you have any ideas?
- Do you suspect I will have issues with loss of strength of my digital signal? If the Mega is in the middle of the 3 X 4 m grid (and I can communicate on multiple output pins), the digital communication line may need to about 3 meters in its longest run before reaching the input of the furthest strand. If I cannot communicate on multiple output pins, then I will have to run the output of one strand up to the input of the next. That's a 1 meter up the strand, then 2 meters to the next strand 12 times over, so about 36 meters of non-strip wire! Any ideas on how can I mitigate signal strength problems?
Danny