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Before you start verify that you have a supported LED type. Lightkraken supports the following LED strip types:
Type | Voltage | Signal |
WS2812 | 5V | 1-Wire |
WS2815 | 12V | 1-Wire |
SK6812 | 5V | 1-Wire |
TM1804 | 5V | 1-Wire |
UCS1904 | 5V | 1-Wire |
GS8208 | 12V | 1-Wire |
SK6812 | 5V | 1-Wire |
APA102 | 5V | Serial (Data + Clock) |
APA107 | 5V | Serial (Data + Clock) |
P9813 | 5V | 1-Wire |
SK9822 | 5V | 1-Wire |
HD107S | 5V | 1-Wire |
LPD8806 | 5/12V | 1-Wire |
TLS3001 | 12V | 1-Wire |
TM1829 | 5V | 1-Wire |
Before wiring up your LED strip make sure you select the right output voltage on the Lightkraken board. Look at the above table for the right voltage.
Lightkraken has two output ports which allows you to attach two separate serial LED strips. If you happen to have a device set up to output analog RGB, see the “Analog RGB” section below as it gets a little bit more complicated.
Terminal A is on the left, Terminal B on the right:
In the example above, the BLACK wire is Ground/GND, the YELLOW wire is the DATA/DOUT line and the RED wire is POWER (5, 12 or 24V). The configuration above applies to all strips using a 1-Wire protocol.
In the example above, the BLACK wire is Ground/GND, the GREEN wire is the CLOCK line, YELLOW wire is the DATA line and the RED wire is POWER (5, 12 or 24V). The configuration above applies to all strips using a serial protocol protocol.
Now that we have connected our LED strip(s) we can plug in our RJ45 cable into the device and PoE switch to power it up. If everything goes well you should see three green LEDs:
The LEDs of your strip(s) will be black/off by default.
By default the device will try to get an IP address using DHCP. If the device successfully acquires an IP address you will notice that the middle green LED will start blinking. If your firewall/router handles hostnames in a standard fashion you can now use the sticker on the back to find the name of the device on your network:
If your mobile device is connected to your local network simply point it to the QR code and it will open the web configuration page of the device. The URL will be in this form:
http://lightkraken-{{8-letter hex}}/
Alternatively check your DHCP leases on your router, example:
As a third option use a tool like ArtNetominator which can enumerate ArtNet devices.
Note that the MAC address will always be in this form:
1e:d5:ff:8f:fe:d5
Where the two first bytes are always “1e:d5” and the 4 other bytes are the same as the hex code on the sticker. These MAC addresses are locally administered addresses (LAA) and should not be made reachable on the public internet.
If you plugin the device into router which is not connected to a router with DHCP, the DHCP detection on the device will time out after 30 seconds. At this point the device will revert to a default IPv4 configuration:
IPv4 address: 169.254.30.213 IPv4 netmask: 255.255.0.0 IPv4 gateway: 169.254.0.1
The static IP can be set up in the web configuration page of the device. Initial access to the web configuration page requires either access through DHCP or the IP address listed above.