LOTS of LEDs once the sun goes down:
http://vimeo.com/105365388
I have to plan for a trip next year. I’d say 3/4 of those projects use FastLED!
Maybe we should organize a FastLED camp and a bunch of us all go.
Wow that’s totally wild!
Thanks for the video! And the optimism!
Based on the (overly-green-looking!) colors I saw all around the playa, I’d say the fraction of enlightened people using FastLED was maybe 5%. It’s hard to know when someone is using it-- but easy to see when they’re not; the yellows look muddy and greenish. By the end of the week, even my poor campmates (who’d been hearing me rant in classic style all week) were pointing out lousy yellows when they saw them.
Still, 5% of Burning Man LED art is… a heck of a lot! I gifted away more than a dozen pieces myself, they’re out there somewhere, some probably even in that video!
Also, it made me realize that one of our challenges is to “get the word out” better, so more people can do more stuff more easily.
@Daniel_Garcia a said he had a FastLED story about some last-minute bike art, but I’ll let him tell it.
Not all projects use fast LED, a lot use octows2811: https://www.pjrc.com/teensy/td_libs_OctoWS2811.html or perhaps the BBB’s PRU based LEDscape: https://github.com/osresearch/LEDscape and I’m sure others roll their own as well. There’s also this guy, which I used for a bit while it was still in beta: http://hypnocube.com/product/led_serial_driver/
I ran into one guy who had written his own for AVR, but when he heard about FastLED, he clearly saw a path out of his own insanity… (and into ours). Also ran into one guy who had written his own (for PIC). What are the odds??
When tackling a project like that, I don’t understand why you wouldn’t Google it first
Some people are hard core? 
Also, some people started before there even WAS FastLED.
And the PIC guy just really likes PIC.
None of them had the nice sunny-lemon yellows that we do though
I’m about 1.5 years in with learning Arduino as a hobby. FastLED, from when it used to be called FastSPI, was and is a foundational learning tool for me, in the realm of microcontrollers and writing functional code. Interaction amongst peers who are eager to learn and share, I think, is the best feature of FastLED library.
I’m guessing that if I had to hardcode LED timings as a rookie/beginner, I would still be in the stone age, so to speak. Probably get frustrated with it and throw it in the pile of eager attempts at something, way too far over my head.
Yeah, I program for a day job, although nothing low level/micro controllers, and having to write spi code and deal with timings would definitely be “fuck it” levels for me
Put yourself in my shoes and try to write all of that for an FPGA.
No thank you I suppose we all have our preferences, I fast prefer the “big” world (data engineering) as opposed to the “small world”
AFAIK a lot of the big pieces are moving to things like openpixelcontrol and large outputs. (the rgb123 stuff, or the pixel pusher).
Well, there’s the one world where your animation runs on your embedded microcontroller; this is what you want for wearables, carry-ables, bike-ables, and basically anything you want to be small, rugged, and/or battery-powered. And then there’s the other world, where your animations actually run somewhere else, on some other device (eg a PC of some sort), and the microcontroller is basically just a dumb pixel driver.
FastLED supports both models, but @Daniel_Garcia and I both have a real passion for the first one, and FastLED definitely reflects that. For example, why would we bother with high-speed sin and cos functions that run on the MCU if all the math is going to be done somewhere else? Ditto things like the “Fire” code, or the crazy-fast Perlin/Simplex noise implementation that runs on the microcontroller? Dan and I both love being able to do everything on a $10 or $20 SOC.
For master/slave architectures, we love FadeCandy, and OPC is great, and there are lots of good choices and building blocks (eg Komby!). Some of those systems also use FastLED at the device driver level, which is also pretty cool.
But ultimately, there are two different worlds there: the embedded world and the master/slave world. Now that I think about it, I’d bet that in the embedded world, FastLED is even more popular than it is the whole population of LED projects overall.
Amazing show and point of viewing