Lobby Wall

I didn't know you could buy pre-made LED pixel strands. I was just figuring out that addressable pixels existed at all, and they were hard to source. Instead, I built a double-sided LED wall from scratch.

Another tech and I spent weeks in the basement building modular panels. We cut 2' x 4' pegboard sheets. We contact-cemented 8 raw LED pucks to each board. We manually soldered custom wire lengths using 4 conductor wire. We made over 5000 solder joints by hand before we ever hung a panel.

We mounted the rows of pegboard to the lobby wall and covered both sides with frosted plexiglass on standoffs. I wired each row to a SanDevices E682, which is essentially a Christmas light decoder. The initial test run was rough. The pixels flickered badly across the entire wall. I didn't know about power injection yet. I added inline resistors at the inputs to smooth out the data signal, and I retrofitted power injection later.

We had to get the modules out of the basement and onto the wall without shutting the club down. We had exactly five days between open weekends to hang the panels, wire the decoders, and map the array in Madrix. The wall was running when the doors opened that Thursday.