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What is the fanout capabilities of ws2811 controllers?

Started by Plasmadrive, February 04, 2025, 08:46:15 AM

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Plasmadrive

I want to drive up to 78 ws2811 inputs in parallel from a single output so they all do the same thing.  These are in groups of 16, 14, 11 and 6.  Each group's inputs are parallel.  I want to drive them all with a single output from the controller if possible because I only have so many outputs.  I know input current shouldn't be an issue, but capacitance might be since all inputs in a group are parallel and that adds up.  

I could drive them with something like F-amps where I have all of the F-amp inputs (7 total) in parallel fed from the controller, and each F-amp drives a group of pixels up to the max of 16 ws2811 inputs. I'm not sure how that would work out, but can anyone shed some technical light on this? 
Would the capacitance be a problem in any section? 
Is there a better way to accomplish this? 
I don't want to put them in the normal serial configuration, I want to drive them as I said. 

Any help would be appreciated.

k6ccc

I would be highly surprised if a single port on a pixel controller could drive 78 strings.  The highest I have done on a test was five or six strings many years ago on a SanDevices E682.  Best suggestion is to test an increasing number of strings paralleled until it fails.  Then figure out how you are going to group them.  Your idea of using F-Amps as a distribution amp should work, but again, you would have to test it to see what works.  I don't see any issue with running the controller output driving some number of F-Amps, and each of those driving some additional F-Amps and each of those driving some number of pixel strings.  I would guess that you would need at least two layers of distribution amps - i.e. something like controller driving five F-Amps, each of those driving four F-Amps, and each of those driving four pixel strings (just grasping at straws on number here).
Please report on your findings so we will all know!
Using LOR (mostly SuperStar) for all sequencing - using FPP only to drive P5 and P10 panels.
My show website:  http://newburghlights.org

Jim

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