Mega Tree Strand/Pixel Setup ?s

[chrisrabkin]

Morning All,
I've been acquiring parts and building as I am learning about xLights and pixels for a few months now and have a question I cannot find the answer to, specifically about a mega tree.

Ive been working with Jim St. John at San Devices on hardware setup for a 16ish strand mega tree. Have power worked out and setup in the E682 controller so good on that front.

The issue is this tree setup has 16 strands with the first 12 outputs (1-1 to 3-4) at a single 100 12v strand of pixels, and the last 4 outputs have 2 strands of 100 which the intent is to wrap from bottom to top and back to the bottom. So the last 4 200 legs act as 8 strands of 100. Have to turn on zigzag in the controller setup for the last 4 200 strands.

In xLights I have a 16 strand 180 degree tree with each strand set to 100 nodes.

The Million Dollar Question is how do I tell the model in xLights that the last 4 strands are 200 nodes?

Thanks for your help in advance.

[Gilrock]

xLights only needs to know the strand counts if you want xLights to push the configuration to the controller.  Since this is non-standard setup I'm not sure you can get auto-configuration to work.  Probably just tell xLights its 16 strings of 100.  That will tell all the data to go Up-Up-Up-Up and then in the controller setup you will manually fix the direction for strings 13 and 15 if the controller setup allows that.

[chrisrabkin]

The last 4 strands are setup in the San Devices control panel as 200 nodes and told to zigzag at 100 pixels because 4-1 to 4-2 have 100 pixels running in the opposite direction.

I tried playing with single lines of pixels then using 4 poly lines that i can make into 200 nodes, but I dont have enough experience with xLights yet to link the 12 single lines and the 4 poly lines together to make 1 unit.

Is there a way to break apart the tree- edit the last 4 strand nodes then group back together as a tree?

Thanks for the reply.
Chris

[allknowing2012]

Might I suggest hopping on xlightszoom.com .. I think you are going to need a couple shadow models to get this on 2 controllers. (about the only way to use 2 controllers on 1 prop). A bit hard to walk thru on here.
Later evenings at xlightszoom.com

[chrisrabkin]

There is only 1 controller- the E682. It has 16 outputs - outputs 1-1 to 3-4 have single strands of 100 pixels each- and 4-1 to 4-4 have 2 strands of 100 put together

[allknowing2012]

Same issue .. you will need shadow models if they are all not the same..

[Gilrock]

If you configure the controller manually you shouldn't need to worry about all this controller setup mess in xlights.