Now we’re getting into the meat of the display – what directly controls the lights. I use two controllers depending on the type of element (or display item) I’m trying to connect.

Controlling Pixels through Falcon controllers

The majority of my display is controlling RGB pixels. The FPP (Falcon Pi Player) sends the data (of what to blink when) to the Falcon F16 controllers. The purpose of the F16 are to:

• Receive data from the FPP
• Send data + power over Ethernet connections
• Configure pixels that are tied to the controller
• Set overall intensity per strand (yep, that’s configurable)
• Set number of pixels per output (16 outputs on the base board)
• Many other things that I’ve never tried

As I said before, this is FAR from everything you need to know, but hopefully this will give you enough information to ask specific questions and just be dangerous enough to try it! 🙂

I currently have three vintages of these pixel controllers. You’ll see blue boards (v2), red boards (V2 with ability to update over network) and white boards (V3). The biggest difference I found between the V2 and v3 boards is:

• The new boards give you a pass-through option for Ethernet connections. This can help reduce the 3 of Ethernet cables at your router.
• The old boards still seem to work with the DMX connections for the Lynx Express controllers and Aether floods (old DIYLightAnimation hardware). I was never able to connect these with the V3 boards.

All of the boards that I’ve used have been flawless. The fuses in the bottom help when you mess up wiring (never did that…right!) or help if you have a short possibly due to water, etc.

The screens allow you to manually set up IP addresses (we’ll get to that later) and provide a quick method to do a pre-set color check to ensure you have everything powered correctly.

I have always powered these boards using 2 separate 30A power supplies. These power supplies are always connected to a single extension cord to a plug (this helps have a common ground for the power supplies).

So how are these hooked up to the rest of the display?

Well, if you remember in the FPP section, I had a drawing that separated the house network and the display network

We’re going to now ignore the home network and focus ONLY on the display network side.

Connections between the FPP, the router, and the F16 boards are all using your standard Ethernet connections. Wiring between the F16s and your lights are using Ethernet wire, but in a slightly different configuration to allow for power and ground to also go to the lights. We’ll get into those details later, but its good to realize that all cables are not made the same.

What other Falcon Boards do you use?

There are other options to help expand where you need it:

Expansion Boards – to help when you need a lot of connections in a close area (like our mega tree, for example)

Diffferential Expansion Boards and Differential receivers – to help when I have a few connections that are *very* far away from any of my F16 boards (like on the top of our garage roof, or on the roof of our house).

I use a combination of all of these boards to build the entire display. The pictures shows the white F16 boards but as I mentioned earlier, I have a combination of White, Red, and Blue vintages of the F16.

Since the above view was a bit distracting, I was tried to find an easier way to plan my setup. This is a “drone” view of my front yard, and it shows generally where all of the controllers will be. Of course, this doesn’t show whether the controller is at ground level or stuck on the roof, but it helps with understanding wiring to each of the main areas.

The above view has a different color for each of the main controllers, and I used the same color when any differential boards were used.

For example, I have 4 boxes in orange. The main F16 is for the garage, and I use 3 or the 4 expansion board slots – one for my garage roof (F16-2 Rec1), one for our breezeway roof (F16-2 Rec2) and one for the kitchen matrix (F16-2 Rec3).