Steve Rozema from Daystar Church in Greensboro, NC brings us this great LED tape configuration. (originally posted August 2016)
From Steve: With about a foot and a half of space between the back line of the worship team and the back wall, and no extra space on either side of the stage, we are challenged with creating a dynamic backdrop that doesn’t take up much space. We also have two portable campuses in addition to our single permanent location that playback video for the sermon, so our designs need to look good on camera.
Having seen a lot of successful implementations of LED strip lighting, we decided to combine that concept with a few other designs we’d seen to create the LED triangle layout. We knew the triangles alone wouldn’t fill the visual space enough because of the plain black wall, so we mounted them to the wall and hung a custom-made black stage scrim in front of them, which allows us to put a color wash in front of the LED design.
We built the triangle frames out of 1″x2″ wood strips painted black. We bought Supernight RGB 5050 waterproof LED strips of 300 LEDs (16.4 ft, or 5M) from Amazon; we bought the waterproof version because that’s what was available at the time, but it would be easier to work with the non-waterproof version for cutting and connecting strips. The LED strips were mounted to the wood using black zip ties, as the adhesive on the strips was ineffective. Not all triangles used a single strip of LEDs; we connected the incomplete strips using 4-pin LED strip connectors. The triangles were each wired (each is controlled individually) using 18/5 thermostat wire, and connected to a DMX decoder, which was powered by a 12v 30A regulated power supply. We mounted the decoders and power supplies in a computer case and installed a DMX port on the back, so that we could easily plug a DMX cable into the computer case and have full control over the system.
The other lighting is provided by Chauvet SlimPar Pro’s and Chauvet COLORado Batten 72’s.
I would love to see the computer case with the decoders in it and the dmx input. The design looks great! Awesome job.
I would also love to see some more photo’s of how everything was wired etc.
I’m slightly confused as to how each fixture is individually controlled when multiple are connected to each decoder and each decoder can only be programmed with one address?…
Thanks!
Steve, that’s a great looking result.
Tim, from only what I can see in the pictures, Steve used several 24 channel decoders. Here is a link to one on Amazon:
Each LED strip will take 3 channels (red, green, blue), so effectively each decode above will drive 8 LED strips. From counting the triangles, it looks to be 20. So three decoders would be needed. Each decoder can have a custom starting address, and is sequential for 24 channels (IE: Decoder A is set to address 1 and goes through 24, Decoder B is set to address 25 and goes through 48, etc.). Every three channels controls the red, green, blue for each strip.
Steve, great job. What are the dimensions of the triangles?