Another year another burning man project. Not got anything to show yet (soon maybe). But I have a question about the dithering in fastled vs fadecandy.
Fastled on a teensy 3.1 is usually my goto for this sort of thing. I have around 350 ws2812 LEDs to drive and I know it will do the job in a single strip just fine. Makes wiring easy.
My question is would I actually get any better visible fading effects with fadecandy? Or could I achieve the same with fastled dithering and limiting my strip length to 64 pixels?
Fadecandy interpolates between frames in addition to dithering. I don’t believe fastLED has interpolation built in, could be wrong.
Depends - fade candy requires an external computer or mcu to drive it, where FastLED is better tuned for running on the teensy itself. So, what is your setup?
You are correct - fade candy does interpolation as well as dithering (doing interpolation would require double buffering frames, among other things - easier for fade candy to do since it is basically acting as a frame buffer/output device)
Good point @Daniel_Garcia . I am going to be running a raspberry pi 2 which will be interacting with a bunch of other hardware (tinyg and 2x neurosky eeg headsets). I figured I would program the animations on the teensy then trigger them over uart. But maybe doing it all on the pi might be better.
If you’re going to have a pi already, why not - then you can make use of the much faster hardware. Either way though, for better frame rates you’re going to want 8-16 segments of LEDs being updated in parallel.
(Assuming you are using ws2812/neopixel a) - at 30us per pixel, 350 LEDs would take 10.5ms per frame to update, capping you at 100fps (just barely high enough for dithering to be useful) - 8 way output would let you push 400fps instead.
Hmm. That is tempting yeah I guess it’s just a bit more wire really. Guess I will give fadecandy a go.