This looks like an interesting little board.

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This looks like an interesting little board. Anyone tried it out? Same 8MHz 3.3V ATmega32u4 as the Flora, with built-in USB, JST battery connector, battery charging, and microSD slot, for $22. If only it were 5V logic, you might not need any level-shifting. Seems like it’d be great for portable POV projects.
https://www.adafruit.com/product/2795

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Huh - I wonder if that spark fun board behaves fully as an Arduino zero - if so, it should work.

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See also the “Qduino Mini” - ATmega32U4 + lipo battery hookup + lipo battery charger + ability to read current battery level + tiny on/off switch = https://www.sparkfun.com/products/13614

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And another I just found today: RedBear Duo. Looks the same as the Photon (STM32F205 ARM Cortex-M3 @120MHz, 128 KB SRAM and 1MB Flash) but with BLE and Wi-Fi, compatible with the “Particle Cloud”, for $19: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1991736672/redbear-duo-a-small-and-powerful-wi-fi-ble-iot-boa

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These are all great! Have you guys used the ESP8266 (NodeMCU) Boards? I know FastLED isn’t supported on them, but they are damn powerful for $10. They have Hardware SPI for APA102 strips and there is a modified neopixel driver for the WS2812 series

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I’m mostly working on blinky lights lately, and love the FastLED library so much that I don’t even buy boards anymore if they aren’t FastLED supported. :slight_smile:

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@Jason_Coon got it. FYI it takes about 10 lines of code to get ws2812 or apa102 leds to work with the ESP8266. Any board that has Hardware SPI is very easy to code up yourself. However I AM posting this on the FastLED group so ill just shut up :slight_smile:

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Now that the ESP toolchain has settled down maybe I’ll look again :slight_smile:

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@Mark_Kriegsman Im using this https://github.com/Makuna/NeoPixelBus/tree/UartDriven library to drive WS2812b strips(use UART branch and disbale WIFI before using) and the built in SPI library to drive APA102. Pretty amazeballs performance for $10

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Thanks, and yeah, I know there are other drivers out there. I dove in early and found the toolchain to be too unstable to be tolerable for me, personally. Looks more stable now!

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Of course FastLED is about more than just pushing pixels to strips - it’s brightness/color management & dithering on output, it’s high performance math and noise functions, it’s trivial switching of platforms and led chipsets, etc… :slight_smile:

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If powering NeoPixels or DotStars straight off the LiPoly (~3.7V), no need for level shifting.