Summary: Segment layout and injection spacing determine whether your LEDs stay bright from end to end.

Segments and Power Injection Planning

Once track position was locked in, I had to solve the bigger puzzle: how many segments the roofline should be split into and where to feed power.

Deciding How Many Segments to Use

A Dig-Quad can drive up to four independent LED zones/segments/channels. That makes it tempting to assign each side of the house its own segment, but that felt unnecessary. For me, two segments was plenty.

Here’s why:

• Less wiring. Every segment needs its own data routed back to the controller. Two segments meant less wire to buy, fewer attic crawls, and fewer chances to snag wires on mystery nails.
• My attic access dictated reality. The corners of my house are boxed in by framing. Reaching them is “technically possible,” but would have required a massive amount of work and destruction.
• Balanced load. Each run covers roughly half the house, which keeps the two power supplies doing about the same amount of work.
• Fewer sync points. More segments means more starts, ends, and injection sites. It’s minimal compared to the total amount of work that this project requires, but it’s something.

For my layout, two was the sweet spot.

Deciding The Segments Starting Point

Each LED segment needs a starting point, and it’s important to choose those spots before you start hanging things.

Here’s what guided me:

• I knew I wanted the start point for each segment to be in the same location (right next to each other). One would run towards the back of the house and one would run towards the front.
• I wanted the start points to be reasonably close to the controller so I didn’t have to deal with corruption issues on the data line.
• I wanted to balance puck counts for the two runs to keep power-supply loading symmetrical.
• Along with the start point, I wanted each mid‑injection and end‑injection point to be easily reachable so future wiring would be easy.

Once I had a good idea of where I wanted it, one more thing made my final decision: for the segment that was going to go across the front and one side of the house, it was important to me that the direction of the segment went in that order… front first, then side.

If any voltage drop ever showed up, I wanted it semi-hidden on the side and not right up front where it’s super visible.

Power Injection Planning

Once the segment lengths were known, I picked injection locations roughly centered on each run. Finding real-world advice on 24V injection needs was surprisingly hard. Everyone knows it’s less frequent than 12V, but few people share actual numbers.

I planned for one mid-run injection and one end-of-run injection per segment and hoped it was enough (it was).

Before wiring the end injection I tested things just to see how they looked. With a regular color pattern it actually looked pretty good, but on full bright white there was a very noticeable color shift at the end of the segment. Everything was fantastic after adding the end injection though. I cover more details on this and the voltages I was seeing in the Install section.

If your runs exceed mine, plan for more injection points.

Consider the Segment End Points

If your goal is the same as mine was (to make the segments be roughly the same length), don’t forget to consider their end points as well. Your house design may prevent this, but ideally the two halves will meet at a spot that is easy for you to access.

Final Thoughts

Good planning and prep will make the install go much better and will give you a more reliable end result. You’re going to run in to problems and roadblocks during the install… having a plan for what your actual goal is will help you work out the best way to handle those problems when you run in to them.