Controlling thousands of WS2811 at once?

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sparr
 
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Controlling thousands of WS2811 at once?

Post by sparr »

When I try to use fastspi_led2 on an Arduino with my ws2811 strips it simply refuses to address more than about 300 LEDs. Are there other options for software to drive these strips that can handle a lot more LEDs? I may end up writing something from scratch.

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adafruit_support_bill
 
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Re: Controlling thousands of WS2811 at once?

Post by adafruit_support_bill »

The Arduino has a limited amount of SRAM (2Kb) so it can support a few hundred pixels. The Mega has 8Kb or SRAM so it has room for a lot more.

digital11
 
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Re: Controlling thousands of WS2811 at once?

Post by digital11 »

You might check out the OctoWS2811 project: http://www.pjrc.com/teensy/td_libs_OctoWS2811.html

People have successfully used it to drive 1,000's of LEDs (about 1,000 per Teensy)

EternalCore
 
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Re: Controlling thousands of WS2811 at once?

Post by EternalCore »

digital11 wrote:You might check out the OctoWS2811 project: http://www.pjrc.com/teensy/td_libs_OctoWS2811.html

People have successfully used it to drive 1,000's of LEDs (about 1,000 per Teensy)
No... More like 250/Teensy!

sparr
 
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Re: Controlling thousands of WS2811 at once?

Post by sparr »

adafruit_support_bill wrote:The Arduino has a limited amount of SRAM (2Kb) so it can support a few hundred pixels. The Mega has 8Kb or SRAM so it has room for a lot more.
I don't necessarily want to keep a list of RGB pixels in RAM. I'd be interested in calculating color values on the fly, or having a repeating pattern, or using a palette, or reading pixel values from PROGMEM, or any other way of driving more LEDs with less RAM.

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Re: Controlling thousands of WS2811 at once?

Post by adafruit_support_bill »

I don't necessarily want to keep a list of RGB pixels in RAM. I'd be interested in calculating color values on the fly, or having a repeating pattern, or using a palette, or reading pixel values from PROGMEM, or any other way of driving more LEDs with less RAM.
It is certainly possible to do that. Our libraries are oriented around updating from an array SRAM, but the low-level pixel communication parts should be adaptable to another source of color information.

digital11
 
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Re: Controlling thousands of WS2811 at once?

Post by digital11 »

EternalCore wrote:No... More like 250/Teensy!
Paul uses 2000 LEDs on two Teensy's in this demo. He recommends not exceeding 1000 LEDs per Teensy, but said its possible to push it to 1300.

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Re: Controlling thousands of WS2811 at once?

Post by digital11 »

I know this post is a month old now, but I just wanted to share this as well, just finished a test run of my WS2811 project, and this is 5 teensy's controlling 1800 pixels, with each driving either 450 pixels or 300, depending on where the teensy will live on the final installation. However, had I desired I could have assigned an additional 5 strips (of 150 pixels each) to each Teensy for a total of 1200 pixels per Teensy. I'm already pushing out (and its already processing) that much data, I just don't have strips hooked up to those 5 pins. Each of those Teensy's is processing a live video stream of jit.matrix data from MaxMSP at 80fps as well.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=pl ... fJrY#t=133

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