As explained on the Planning page, there are a couple of easy options if you want more than seven drips…
- You can drive 8 drips from one board, but you won’t get ground splats in that case.
- You can just build multiple units. There’s nothing that needs to be synchronized between them.
A third option is to split some of the output signals to multiple strips. This is a thing you can do with NeoPixels…feed the same data output to two or more strips and they’ll all show the same thing. I used this on the dragon to provide nine drips total…the first two drips, plus the splats, are “recycled.”
There are some gotchas doing it this way…
These drips are an exact copy. The ooze, dribble, drip and splat all occur in perfect sync, so it really only makes sense visually if there are two points at similar heights on your prop.
You’ll want to put some distance between them, or on opposite sides of the prop. This makes the duplicate drips less obvious.
This is why I only added two extra drips on the dragon…there weren’t many positions where the dribble would look right on another part of the skull, and I didn’t want an exact left/right copy of everything.
If you add duplicates this way, start from NeoPXL8 output #0 and work up from there. That’s so the duplicate splats sync up. Looking at the diagram above, you can see only two splat pixels are needed on the extra strand, corresponding to the two extra drips. You don’t want or need an entire duplicate splat strand.
Page last edited March 08, 2024
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