There’s a lot you can do with RGB lighting. From art installations to mood lighting, to creating RGB LED video screens or decorating your computer, addressable RGB LEDs are now made in huge quantities with varying strip lengths up to 100 meters long! The oft-overlooked controller is vital to making RGB lighting work in a particular application, though. It needs to be fast enough to create smooth lighting transitions, be robust enough to handle large strips of LEDs and have adequate protection against overcurrent and other transients. The Wasatch Pixels Quad+ Controller does all this and more!
In addition to powering 4 strips of RGB tape, it has a differential driver output that allows you to daisy-chain another 4 strips which can be quite a distance away if needed. Powered by an ESP32, it has an on-board Ethernet jack so you can choose between Wi-Fi or wired network connectivity. Automotive-style fuses protect each strip individually, so if something shorts out it should fail safe. And replacement fuses are inexpensive and easy to get at any automotive or hardware store, meaning you can get back up and running quickly once the fault is cleared.
The driver can be controlled by WLED companion Android or iOS apps. Additionally, the driver supports receiving E1.31 and DDP data from specialty LED controller applications like Vixen, xLights, and Falcon Player. The differential driver output can feed into many off-the-shelf lighting controllers, or you can get a companion receiver from Wasatch as well! The receiver can also be up to 300 feet away from the driver board.
The Quad+ features high-framerate streams for very smooth, organic-looking lighting. With up to 400 pixels per port, it can maintain 40 updates per second reliably (that’s a lot of data!) and has been tested up to 600 pixels per port. At 800 pixels per port, it can still maintain 20 updates per second, which, depending on the application, might still be sufficient. Being able to drive that many LEDs from a single controller is very useful for creating large installations! If you’ve got a NeoPixel project in mind, check out the range of products from Wasatch on Tindie, and see if they have what you need!
