Anyone looked at or have this new ShieldBuddy TC275 multicore Arduino board?
Seems like it could support several parallel strips!
https://www.rs-online.com/designspark/bringing-multicore-to-the-arduino-world-with-shieldbuddy-tc275?cm_mmc=US-EM--DSN_20161219--DM11668-_-TTB_URL4&cid=DM11668&bid=179876126
Three setup() and loop()? That’s pretty interesting. I wonder if you could use this to improve output speeds on WS2812B… could you run three separate show() functions?
After a brief read, I would guess that yeah, you can run 3 instances of FastLED, but here’s the but.
But, FastLED would be difficult to port to this design, and likely wouldn’t be something to happen quickly, even with test HW. There are also likely some very significant multicore issues related to this that would make porting FastLED even harder.
It would be an interesting way to run, say 12 strips individually, 4 on each core, for a total of maybe 1500 lights and not need extra HW. But I would suspect that due to the design and some reasonable guesses at compromise due to how you use it, it doesn’t work quite that way.
I’d be willing to hear other opinions though.
For 80 Pounds Id rather use 20 ESP8266!
Hi, I have had a look at what would be involved in porting FastLED to the ShieldBuddy TC275. From what I can see, a lot effort is put into speeding up the IO pin access and SPI on slower micros like the AVR and SAM3. With the TC275, the IO pin access is sub-100ns and there are 4 SPI channels that can run at up to 50MB/s with almost no CPU load. It should be possible to run 3 instances of FastLED on the 3 cores. I have started to follow the http://porting.md instructions for creating a new platform but I am pretty sure I am going to get stuck! Anyone got any hints? I could really do with a version of FastLED which addresses the port pins through the usual Ardunio functions as these may be fast enough. Cheers
Is there a FastLED version configured to use the standard Arduino digitalRead, digitalWrite and SPI functions? I know this would be a bit slow but trying to port from highly optimised code for ARM and AVR to the TC275 has defeated me!