Hue and rgb drivers

I’ve just started having a go at all of this stuff so apologies if I’m bringing up something obvious here as well as something not specifically Vera related.

I have added both 1ID and 2ID Gledopto rgb+cct drivers to a hue hub as well as buying rgbw and rgbWW+CW strips. The rgbw is a 4 in 1 5050 and the rgbWwCw is rgb 5050 and separate WwCw 5050, both 24v.

I decided to see what current was being drawn by the rgbWwCw strip and with either rgb or white I was only seeing around 0.6A. With the 2ID driver with both rgb and white I could see 1.1-1.2A, given this is a 14.4W/m and 5m long I was expecting more like 3A at 100%. I thought the strip was maybe sub-par.

I then tried connecting direct to the PSU (100W) and the strip would happily pull 0.6A per colour and 1.2A with any two. That would give the expected power draw of around 72W for all of them, though I didn’t try that as the strips are still rolled up and I didn’t want to cook them.

The rgbw was 0.7A on rgb and 0.9A white so again maxing to give 72W. Driving both rgb and white was 1.6-1.7A

With the strips in series and driving both rgb and white I could get around 2.3, obviously a bit of series loss, the supplied wires are tiny so the V+ was probably
struggling.

TL:DR

It looks like Hue sets the drivers to drive multiple channels proportionally, so 100% with all three channels evenly set will drive each at 33%. That kind of makes sense to give an even brightness, however it does mean you are only ever going to drive the strips to 40-50% and in the case of the ones I bought the white output on the rgbw is likely to be around 50% higher and combined around 33% than the rgbWwCw.

Do the z-wave drivers work similarly?

Does this mean PSU rating can be looked at differently? You don’t need a 100W supply for a 5m of 14.4W/m if you can only drive it to 36W. I only used a normal Fluke MM and checking with a scope might show peak drive currents that are higher if multiple channels are driven simultaneously.

for led i totally recommend looking at quinled, you get all info there,
for rgb use sk6812rgbnw (you get one real white chanel with much better cri the standard rgbww, to kontroll this use dig uno from quinled. (this topic is large and take manny pages to go thru all, but quin led have done this so go and read and also use discord for you questions.

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Thanks, been reading through that since last night.