quick question im looking into making a screen out of my balcony (9X34 array of ws2811s) each bulb is 3 1/4 apart and the rows are 4 apart would i dont know if i gave enough info for an idea but where would i start to make this display text? also does anyone think this would look ok?
im dumb theres an example in fastled…i retract that question. but does anyone think it will look ok that far appart?
What is the size of your bulb ?
I think a 5mm LED or even those pixel modules with a 8mm LEDs would make a poor display with your pixel spacing.
I suggest you take a blank piece of paper the size of one of your characters (guess it is 6X9 ?) with correctly sized dots that you would color to represent some character. Pin that to your balcony and look at it from a reasonable viewing position, you will then get your own idea.
Alternatively, draw the thing reduced precisely to scale and you will still get a better idea if you want to proceed.
Note that I am sure that even with a small pixel size, the thing will be readable at a distance. The brain is good at filling in the missing dots… 
Some diffusion in front of the strips could help a tiny bit with making the “dots” in your characters a bit larger and not such small points of light, but still, that spacing sounds a bit large.
@marmil Very good idea! I saw a design where someone covered LEDs with white coffee style Styrofoam or plastic cups (Was it here ?) I noted that I should recycle that idea one of these days !
they are 13mm diffused bulbs they are decently big but i dont know if that is large enough
I use draftsight to sketch my projects. It’s free find it with google. It is a pretty good 2d software. There is a bit of a learning curve but its worth the time. YouTube videos are helpful.
Pixel spacing is a bit wide to render pictures but patterns should be OK.
The largest pixel pitch I’ve seen on pro screens is 50mm or about 2 inches.
yeah the display cant happen oh well but i can do rows of the strings @Michael_Sharnet these are the ones i bought off you haha now i just need to do some checking on what will look good with just 2 rows haha
Inches? Do they still use those?
As a colonial, we stopped using them around 45 years ago…
Some are just stubborn, I guess 