Power & LED wiring

OmnaDMX drives addressable LED strips — the kind with a chip per pixel (WS2812/SK6812-class and similar), in RGB or RGBW. It does not drive analog or COB strip. You wire power and a data line, then describe each strip in the config app.

Power

Give the LEDs their own supply and power the controller separately. Size the LED supply for the worst case: a full-white RGB pixel pulls roughly 60 mA, and you should budget for every pixel on at once even if your patterns never do that. RGBW spreads the draw across four channels, but the peak is what matters.

Two things bite people:

• The LED supply and the controller need a common ground. Without a shared reference the data line glitches.
• Long runs need power injection — feed power at both ends, and at the middle on very long runs. An under-powered tail drifts warm and dim toward the far end. That’s voltage drop.

Caution

A colour shift toward the far end of a strip is almost always power, not software. Check the supply and injection before you touch colour order or gamma.

Data

Each board has a fixed number of LED data outputs. This is the main hardware difference between them:

• Sparkle Motion: 3 outputs.
• ESP32-S3-ETH: up to 8 outputs, via PixelBlaze Output Expander(s).

Each strip’s data-in goes to one controller output. Keep data leads short. On long or noisy runs a level shifter and a small series resistor (around 330 Ω) at the source clean up the signal. One controller output is one strip in software.

Declare each strip in software

Wiring alone isn’t enough. The renderer needs three things per strip, set in the Strips tab:

• Length. The pixel count on that output. Set it short and the tail stays dark; set it long and you address pixels that aren’t there.
• Colour order. Strips ship in different orders (RGB, GRB, and so on), and RGBW adds a white channel. If red comes out green, this is the setting. RGBW lets the engine use a real white channel instead of mixing it from RGB.
• Slices. How the strip splits into independently-addressable spans, which then group into elements. This is the model behind running more than one pattern at once; see Elements, slices & chains.

Limits

Limit	Sparkle Motion	ESP32-S3-ETH
Strip outputs	3	8
Slices per strip	32	32
Virtual elements (device-wide)	8	8

Next: First boot & the OLED.