Another option for rgbw is text scrollers / displays. Having a nice white without having to mix (which is often a little inconsistent) for the text helps while you can still show colored graphics. Also one led uses less power and creates less heat than three, doesn’t it?
@Thomas_Balu_Walter Having a pre-mixed pure white is a nice option, but maybe not as important if you are using FastLED’s color correction (FastLED.setCorrection) to make sure the R G and B are in balance on your strip. Still a good option though.
As for power, basically the power draw comes from the amount of light you make, not the count of emitters. So brighter = more power, and it (mostly) doesn’t matter whether the brightness is coming from three 10mA LEDs or one 30mA LED. There are some efficiency differences between the different colors of LED chemistry, and there’s definitely a race for brightness efficiency in white LEDs because of the applications for general lighting. Wikipedia has a good table showing some of this under LED : Technology : Efficiency And Operational Parameters https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light-emitting_diode
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light-emitting_diode
The thing I’m trying not to get mired down in (and I think we’re not, which is great) is trying to invent a four-dimensional R G B W colorspace, and convert in and out of it all the time. I suspect our first RGBW support will be just that: a new class called CRGBW, and everything else just the same. Conversion from HSV colors will probably not use the W channel at first, but might later. And again, we have a bunch of personal things to attend to, but we’re thinking about RGBW support as one of the next things we’d want to tackle.
@Netsplite what are the advantages of this new chip, compared to WS2812 and others out there? I couldn’t tell from their website.
@Ryan_Cush It’s 12V and has a much higher brightness which is needed when using it as primary room lightning, 5V at that length + power draw you would need a lot more wiring to combat the voltage drops and a pretty expensive PSU with high amperage.
Initially went with WS2811 (12V variation) however when placed in ceiling they don’t produce enough light, found this alternative to TM1814 recently by a dutch retailer:
tested and works with FastLED as it’s using regular WS2812 RGB protocols but they are a bit expensive as I need 30-50 meters.
So still looking for alternatives at the moment but for primary room lighting and individual addressable market seems pretty limited, if anyone knows of any would be much appreciated.
If you’re happy with 12V RGB leds, search Alibaba for WS2815 strips, there are a number vendors. None on AliExpress yet though.
Tried a few vendors on Alibaba for the WS2815 but they are either not replying or can’t send Arduino code examples, do you know if these work with FastLED by any chance?
Thanks, will do 
I’ve just noticed that the strip you linked to appears to have 5V LEDs. There are 3 LEDs per controller. The WS2815 type LEDs are genuine 12V LEDs, controlled individually, each plastic chip has 9 LEDs in it, 3 red, 3 blue and 3 green, and they’re supposed to be very bright…
Yeah and according to supplier they can go up to 42W per meter compared to the others which are ~20W, need some dedicated cooling for that I think.
Just got reply from supplier and they say SJ1221 uses WS2811 IC as well and is 1200 lumen p/m, 24W p/m instead of 14,4W so looks like the way to go for now just hope it’s bright enough for room lighting:
https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Magic-dream-color-dc12v-SJ1221-SJ1211_60732335414.html
WS2815 I might order a sample to test but they can’t list what IC it really uses or give code examples.
I’ve gotten hooked on the data redundancy of ws2813 so it makes it hard to consider these other chips even though I’d love more brightness. If one led goes out, it isn’t a catastrophic situation.
I suppose eventually they will have those for the brighter chips. Though for most 12v setups you’d still probably lose a bank of 3 LEDs. The true individually addressable 12V sounds awesome but man, that’s a ton of power loss through heat, right??
http://www.doityourselfchristmas.com/wiki/index.php?title=Choosing_a_Pixel_Voltage:_5V_vs_12V
@Ryan_Cush , WS2815 have the same redundancy as WS2813 but run at 12V and are much brighter… They are supposed to be more efficient, so less heat. But time will tell. I don’t have any for testing (yet).
@Jeremy_Spencer I’m looking at the WS2815 data sheet and the brightness is the same as WS2813b.
Now, there is a WS2813a variant that is ~30% brighter, but I haven’t seen these available anywhere
I can see the benefit in terms of voltage drop, of using 12V and down-converting to lower voltage for the LEDs. But I am still wondering how they would get around massive heat/energy loss during the voltage drop.
Are these WS2815 strips controlled with 5V input? Or do they need 12 V too?
Oh if these had been on the market when I did $massive_project a few years ago. Kinda makes me want to rebuild it, just for how much simpler it’d be 
.
I’ve just ordered some GS8208s to try, they look like a 12V WS2813B…
Hi…I was wanting to get some assistance getting some RGBW TM1814 pixel LED’s running on an Arduino Uno.
I’ve attempted numerous libraries from the Adafruit neopixel library and shifting FastLED RGBW fit forks and the principle FastLED Library.
From what I comprehend from perusing the datasheets on for the TM1814 (here) and the adafruit RGBW neopxiel (or SK6812 here) the timings are very close with the exception of the TReset which I accept may be the reason for my issues.
I have additionally attempted other dev sheets, the little 3.5 and sparkfun ESP32 thingplus with 3.3v - 5v rationale level circuits with no karma.
In the event that anybody could bring up something I might’ve missed or has had some past progress with this chip and can reveal some insight it would be phenomenal.
You might cite this post for context asking on the current location of the FastLED community on Reddit:
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