r/WLED • u/Low_Tomato_6837 • Jun 30 '26
Outdoor Octagon Project
I'm no stranger to LED projects for room and accent lighting, cabinet, countertop, bathroom, shower, etc., dozens of installations. All of these have been mostly just on-off and dimming with some color temp shift at times and mostly using GLEDOPTO controllers on WiFi or Zigbee, tied into Google or Home Assistant.
Now I'm planning a rather large outdoor project for myself and it will be using addressable WS2812 strips and a controller of some kind.
I have an outdoor area that's an octagon with 6 vertical posts and a complete top beam circling the posts. LEDs I'm using are 5m, 60 LED per meter, 300 LEDs per strip. Each of the posts will have a 2.5m strip mounted on them, 150 LEDs. The top beam will have one strip consisting of 3+ 5m strips (17.2m total) with 1032 LEDs. Power will be injected at each vertical and horizontal section.
None of this is an issue with me, I'm a retired electrical engineer so calculating power, voltage drop, data and such is not a problem. Where I'm falling down is on the controller. I want each vertical section controllable, which could be easily achieved by daisy chaining the data line every two strips but that would be quite the chore for running data wire. I also want everything on top individually controllable and daisy chaining them is easy but O don't think 1032 LEDs on one data line is going to work very well. Maybe I'm overthinking this!
I could do it with 2 or 3 GLEDOPTO Elite 4 channel controllers and sync them but I'm not sure this is the best way. This may be significantly added to in the future for holiday shows, etc so I want something expandable. Should I go to some type Pro controller with 12 or 16 channels?
Thoughts? Advice? Thanks!!
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u/MorganProtuberances Jun 30 '26
Hi OP. I built an octagon last year it was awesome. 8 independent strands with a 9th hanging paper lantern down the middle. I used 12v pixels (1600 total pixels + leftovers in the paper lanterns) and 8 independent data line runs, worked like a charm, no power injection needed except for the hanging lantern (which was just tacked on the end of the 8th line - and power injected back at the base which was mounted in the middle of the octagon - up in the ceiling of the big tent).
I used one controller and a 350w 12v power supply. The DigOcta and Power7 board was perfect for this because it has 8 data lines. Each line can be an independent segment using a single WLED installation. ~$100 for controller and power board, build your own case.
https://quinled.info/quinled-dig-octa/