Written by Seth Pierce from Opendoor Church
Equipment Used
- 11 DMX-3CH-4A LED Decoders
- 11 16-foot 5050SMD RGB LED Strips
- 60M of 4-conductor connecting wire
- Black Plastic Tracks
- Coroplast
- 3M Double Sided Foam Tape
- Solder
- Time (and lots of it)
Venue Details
Our sanctuary stage is divided into three sections. The left and right sections under the projectors are 16’x18’ and the center section is 30’x19’. Our creative pastor took a relatively square photo of the stage and I added a 1’x1’ grid over it in GIMP. After that, I just used trial and error to place the strips. You’ll notice in the picture below that there are two gray bars running through the center section. These bars are painted black and house PAR blinders, Chauvet Intimidator Spots, and Chauvet Intimidator Washes. As the bars, wall, and lights are black, they ‘disappear’ when they’re off. The goal was to place the strips so you couldn’t tell there were light bars placed in front of the strips.
Design Details
As you can see, the strips are spaced out to maximize coverage. The 16-foot strips were cut to length and 4-conductor wire was soldered to each strip to connect everything. This was a very time consuming process; it took about 15 hours to solder all the strips. We used EvZ® 4 Color 20m RGB Extension Cable Line for LED Strip RGB 5050 3528 Cord 4pin connecting wire as it was cheap and kept the wiring neat.
This wire works well, but I wouldn’t exceed the lengths shown in the photo below. There is a small, but noticeable decay in brightness towards the end of each strip. I attribute this to the amount of LEDs we’re powering and the high wire gage.
11 DMX decoders (DMX-3CH-4A 4 Amp 3 Channel LED DMX Controller/Decoder) drive the strips and are powered by laptop style power bricks.
The power estimates listed below are horribly inaccurate. I really shouldn’t be trusted to do math late at night… Red lines are the LED strips and blue lines are the connecting wire.
Mounting Details
For mounting, we used black plastic track available from your local hardware store. I don’t have any specifics as to which tracks were used as our associate pastor handled all of that. Coroplast was placed on top of the LEDs to diffuse the light a bit and prevent it from looking like a bunch of colored dots on the wall. This was then covered with 20% window tint from Wal-Mart to allow the strips to ‘disappear’ when turned off. With this amount of tint we run the strips at about 50% power, depending on the color mix.
When it came time to hang everything, we used 3M double-sided tape. This stuff is ridiculously strong. We had to straighten up one row of strips and ended up peeling the paint off the wall! Hanging only took about 2 hours as we projected the grid up on the wall.
Download Package (full-resolution diagrams, photos and a master .XCF GIMP schematic)
See It In Action
