Scottish Consulate

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====== blinkenlights ======

=== What we've got ===

 8x ~1m bars with ~120 neopixels on them. I was planning to hang these off the diagonal wires lighting up into the roof of the tent. 4 might be enough for that - would then have 4 to use elsewhere. Could easily make more of these. 

 A bunch of bottles and jars with neopixels in them. Some painted to be diffused glowing bottle/jar ([[https://photos.app.goo.gl/wjnknUxgMLBcYCdAA]]) and some left clear with mess of neopixels on enameled wire or the like. Not sure how much use these would be for the tent - they mostly need a flat surface to sit on. Some of the plastic bottles could probably be hung from the tent. Biggest of these have 100 neopixels in them, which would be 30W at max but there is no way the thin wire in the strings can handle the 6A needed for that. Best case it'll offer enough resistance to limit the current and not catch fire or melt, but I wouldn't want to rely on that. I have run those ones with 2A limit in WLED and that seemed fine - air inside the bottles got to ~15 degrees above ambient which should be fine. 

 There should be some 12V RGB not individually addressable bars as well but I could only find the ones hanging from the roof at 57N when looking for them before campGND. I think there should be another 3 somewhere. Have some P9813 controller boards for them. I think the board controlling the ones on the roof in 57N was made at last CCCCamp so would be nice to see it going back with some bars to control.  

 Loads of ESP8266s. Have one each attached to the bars and still have a few spares. Though my box of ESPs was starting to look a little empty so have ordered another 25 - and got ones with type C connectors this time so shouldn't have to go hunting for a micro cable to program this lot. 

=== What I might get ===

I'm really tempted by these reels of fairy light style stings of neopixels [[https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005004633923201.html]]

Could power/control some strings of them with same approach as for neopixel bars.

Say 3 rows along each of the 3 solid walls. Would be 54m. Or could go slightly less than full length of wall for each to get the total inside a 50m reel. Or get a 100m reel and have plenty of spare to string other places. Or single string round those 3 walls but go for one of the denser pixel pitches.
 
=== Power distro ====

 This was the bit that stopped actually having the bars up at campGND. Vague plan is 12V or 24V (or something in the 8-36V range that is commonly accepted by the 5V regulators I have) to each light (or group of lights if there are a bunch of them in the same place, I was thinking to have 4 off 1 regulator in center of tent. I need to check what regulators I've got might need to get some more. 

 Bars currently have .1" dupont headers for power input, but I wouldn't trust them for more than about 1A so am planning to swap them for XT30s and decent guage wire. Also thinking to use XT30s for the 12V distro cables. I don't like having different voltages on the same connector as that is only a matter of time till someone puts 12V straight into the neopixels and lets the magic smoke out (I actually haven't tried that, the neopixels might survive 12V if they weren't trying to light at the time, I'm pretty sure the ESP wouldn't) but I don't know of anything else with similar current capacity and price. Any suggestions?

 This all needs a source of 12V (or something in 8-36V range). The scotcon box of power has 12V car battery in it that can probably provide something like 100A, but it wouldn't be able to do that for very long. Limit is probably the charger putting power back into the battery, I don't know what it is but single digit number of A is common and we certainly have enough lights to burn more than that (and I might buy more). I have some 750W 12V server PSUs [[https://argh.technology/posts-output/2020-07-07-hp-psu/]], one of them would probably work as power supply for this. 750W is probably enough lights. Though we could get a bigger one. Or run more than one... But I (or someone else) would need to find the time to put together some wiring from it to xt30 connectors (or whatever we're using for 12V). And some fuses would probably be a good idea.    

=== Control interface ===
 I was sticking ESPs on each light and planning to use WLED. It definitely has UDP real time interface of a few varieties - Allie said they'd found one of the DMX-on-network variants was already supported there? 

 I'm not sure how well this'll work at CCCCamp (or other camps). They probably don't want folks running their own wifi AP for this kind of thing. Though might be able to get the OK for that as preferable to having this on the main network if talk to them ahead of time and coordinate to be using different channels from main Camp network. Chucking them on the main camp wifi network could be unreliable if they happen to be somewhere with poor signal and/or annoying to other folks on the network.  

 I have got a small pile of MAX485 chips (and they're cheap (https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1727326359.html) if we need more, or I can't find them) that could be used to give the ESPs a DMX cable interface. Though I'd probably go for some other connector than XLR - RJ45 is way cheaper, or could go properly janky and just solder .1" pin headers onto twisted pairs out of some network cable. Or leave the network cable intact and put power on the other pairs. Or some protocol other than DMX - I think DMX struggles with many individual LEDs so we'd have to group them or have pre-canned effects? But that is second hand knowledge from other people complaining about that - it's a couple of decades since I've actually done anything with DMX so I've forgptten pretty much all the details. I would like to play with making DMX cable controlled neopixels - but I don't know if I'll have time to do that before CCCCamp and it does add some more complexity to wiring if we add data cables to each light. 
  
====== Lights to see by ======

We have some mains clip on lamps and LED bulbs for them for when you want boring constant white light to see what you're doing by.

There was a (kind of safe if noone pulled the wrong wire - it could really have done with some strain relief on the mains input to the box that should really have been in a wall) dimmer extension cable for them, not sure if we still have that.

I have about ~100 ~1W 12V bulbs. Was planning to make a string of them. Or maybe a few strings with connectors to string them together or power them separately. I've had that plan for a few years already and haven't actually done it yet.