I've looked through the groups and haven't seen anything that people are using to

I’ve looked through the groups and haven’t seen anything that people are using to generate their effects. I was thinking of something like Glediator but instead it would write part of your code?
http://www.solderlab.de/index.php/software/glediator

Can you provide a bit more info about what you’re looking to try?

Instead of streaming RGB data directly to the micro, Glediator can write the steam to a file to be read later. But it sounds like you’re thinking of something else perhaps.

@marmil I know that typically are just following code examples and creating effects by writing code. The one thing that caught my attention about Glediator is that you can see onscreen what the different effects will look like and it’s fairly easy to create the code you want without having to know APIs.
So this got me to thinking that since Glediator appears to be a dead project and it wasn’t open source is there anything along the lines of this that FastLED users could use?

Yes it’s a bummer Glediator development stopped. :confused:

@Chris_Parton has been working on something fun though.

@George_Ioakimedes I use glediator some others use jinx or even other which do typically the same. The streaming is done via artnet protocol.
You can stream directly of record the stream on SD card for later replay.

@George_Ioakimedes I use glediator some others use jinx or even other which do typically the same. The streaming is done via artnet protocol.
You can stream directly of record the stream on SD card for later replay.

@marmil sparkled looks interesting and along the lines of what I was thinking. Seems similar (in that it’s Java and uses Maven) to Udder. I didn’t dig into the sparkled code but I assume you run this on something like a Raspberry Pi and then still use your Teensy/ESP8266/ESP32 boards to drive the LEDs?

@Yves_BAZIN I finally downloaded glediator the other day and played around with it a bit (just with the software). I’ve heard of jinx but I’m curious how you would connect everything up in these situations. Did I miss that FastLED supports artnet?

@George_Ioakimedes there is an artnet library that works with FastLED

@Yves_BAZIN So I see that Jinx is a Windows only application and I’m trying to come up with a system that is standalone without any computers running. It looks like Jinx can output some file types but with my limited search I’m not sure if that helps to achieve my goal.

Is there a way that you know of to use one of these GUIs to help create code that you want to run on your board? If not then I guess I would need to sit down and start going through the APIs and run some experiments. My initial goal is to try and create a LED Matrix panel that is about 2 feet by 2 feet but then maybe later grow that display to something bigger.

Glediator outputs a bunch of hex values. I imagine Jinx can output something similar. A micro-controller can read that off an SD card for un-tethered playback.

Depending on how you grow your matrix you might need to write some additional code to remap the output from Jinx (or Glediator, etc) to your new matrix size, but totally possible. Or you might simply be able to update the size in Jinx. That would depend on what direction(s) you expand the matrix and how you wired the original.

Glediator output:

So I take it that most people just do all the hand coding for each setup? I was initially thinking that work had been done on creating a GUI to create your “shows/effects” but that doesn’t appear to be the case (yet).

There are certainly some great builds were people are feeding a microcontroller a RGB data stream from an external source, but most people code different functions that the controller runs to generate patterns. These can still be quite random and varied if setup correctly, or very specific and fixed to exactly what you want displayed.

@Andrew_Tuline What was the name of that visualizer/pattern generator you checked out awhile back? Have you used it much? Did it generate RGB data you used with FastLED?

@marmil Hey Marc, the one I bought was Pixelblaze by Ben Hencke. Pretty cool product, although I wish the programming language was C and using FastLED. :smiley:

Pixelblaze does look interesting but it appears to slow down too much with larger arrays:

5000 LEDS: 2-4+ FPS (slow-fading backgrounds, ambiance)

His board uses the ESP8266 so it’s actually a good sign that it even works with that many LEDs but I wonder if the ESP32 would bump this up or if you could parallel them up as projects grow.

I have no problem supporting people’s projects and efforts and even throwing (well maybe not blindly throwing) money at it. I guess I’m just looking for the best solution to “back” and start researching. Having something open source AND active is a big plus. Glediator scares me a bit since it looks like the authors walked away from it.

I could be wrong but with so many ARM based MCUs and boards out these days it seems like you should be able to run a pretty large system without having to rely on something running an OS.

Like jinx and glediator, Any android app available to stream patterns over UDP or artnet?