Hey guys not posted for a bit, illness and work have pretty much put everything on hold, looking forwards to getting stuck back in now and I’m going to start with a question, I’m going to be using fastled with an arduino 2560 and 4.5m of ws2812, obviously there’s the power issue so I’ll be feeding power at both ends as they both end up in the same place, but what sort of frame rate can I expect over 4.5m?
I’m not looking for blistering speeds but reasonably smooth animation would be nice if I can achieve it, I have used lpd8806 before but the data lost integrity at about 5m for some odd reason
Welcome back! Hope all is well.
My rule of thumb is that WS2811 (and family) can handle about 30,000 pixels of data per second over the wire.
So if you have 100 pixels, the maximum update rate will be 300 updates/second. If you have 1,000 pixels, you can’t get more than 30 updates/second. And that’s the absolute maximum the driver chip can handle.
4.5m with 30 pixels/m = 135px = about 200 updates per second.
4.5m with 60 pixels/m = 270px = about 100 updates per second.
In other words, WS2811s are slow. LPD8806 and APA102 (the new hotness!) can go ten times as fast. Check out the APA102s; in terms of speed, form factor, and price, I suspect they’ll be what we’re all using as our ‘default’ LED type a year from now.
That help?
Thanks Mark, I’ve previously used LPD8806 on all my projects but my friend doesnt seem to understand “dude wait to order your strips, dont just run out and get them” lolol