Finished my blog post with build details that hopefully can help the next crazy

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Finished my blog post with build details that hopefully can help the next crazy person doing something like this. I think @Yves_BAZIN and I already learned our respective lesson :wink:
Big thanks for Yves of course for his encouragement, guidance, and 16 way parallel driver, @Sam_Guyer for his ESP32 RMT FastLED driver, @Jason_Coon for his Aurora demos I was able to re-use and @Mark_Estes for even more of his demos I was also able to reuse.

http://marc.merlins.org/perso/arduino/post_2018-07-30_Building-a-64x64-Neopixel-Neomatrix-4096-pixels-running-NeoMatrix-FastLED-IR.html

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Wow, nice. That’s raw leds right? Seems like it would look better with something to diffuse it a bit so it’s not so pixel looking.

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@Steve_Anken yeah a diffuser would be nice, but

  1. unless you stand in front of it, it’s not pixel looking
  2. nice diffusers are actually heavy and often breakable, which is not great for transport either.
  3. this is meant to be broken down in 2 halves so that I can transport it (going to burning man as I write this)
  4. sadly for burning man I’m going to have to make it water proof to some extent. I’m going to try and cover it with Cella wrap to make it somewhat water proof. It might act as a diffuser somewhat, or not, we’ll see :slight_smile:
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So this is what you’ve been up to.
Cool.

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@Marc_MERLIN great job for the panel and sharing how you did it
We should have a section in this community dedicated to post blog like these and best tricks.
So for the newcomers they could browse to different projects.

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@Yves_BAZIN not a bad idea. @Daniel_Garcia is that something you think is worth doing/possible for you to add with minimal effort?

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If I could give you 10 +++++++++++++ Cudos Maximus !

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Thank you for sharing this! I’m about to start on a project that is very similar to this, and this will be a great help. One request - can you share your wiring diagram? Or take a few better pictures of how you wired everything up? Which power supply you used?

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@Min_Idzelis I don’t really have a wiring diagram, but it was very straightforward: simply wire 16 lines of neopixels to 16 data lines on the ESP32. The data lines I used are defined in the code I shared.
Power supply, I originally used two 60A power supplies from amazon, but they were too loud (not enough ventilation and a fan that came on too often). I just returned them and replaced them with two 40A power supplies.
Math shows that 4096 LEDs can use 160A at full bright, but honestly 80A for my use is more than enough.
If you have another question on how it’s wired, please ask.

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@Marc_MERLIN Which ESP32 board did you use? I noticed that there is a ESP32-WROVER, which adds 8MB of SRAM. Should I be able to use one of these, or does the SPI driven SRAM take away the ability to drive the 16pins in parallel?

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@Min_Idzelis I used 3 basic $20-ish chips, and they all worked. None of them had additional RAM.
I have no idea how many pins SRAM adds, but there are up to 24 pins usable for parallel output on ESP32, so I doubt that using a few pins for extra SRAM is going to prevent 16 pin parallel output.
I’d recommend you try it and reach out to @Yves_BAZIN if you run into troubles with his driver.