Does anyone know if FastLED is okay driving two strings of two different types

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1

Does anyone know if FastLED is okay driving two strings of two different types of LEDs? What about one WS2812 and one APA102?

I’m going to try it soon, but I thought I’d save myself some trouble if someone else has done this already. The wiki examples don’t actually cover this scenario.

2

Not on the same pin.

3

Right, sure. Any idea if okay on separate pins?

4

Just make a separate FastLED.addLeds line for each type of strip.

5

Yay, excellent news. Any idea if mismatched DATA_RATE causes issues? And if some pins are software and some are hardware SPI?

I have kinda “worst-case” scenario: I want to add one string of ~250 WS2812s while already driving 4 strings of 800 SK9812 on eight other pins.

6

On which MCU?

7

Oops, Teensy 3.2. Running it at 120MHz so far with seemingly no issues.

8

If you are going to be running the same animations on the different strips at the same time I would recommend setting the data rate of the strips to match each other. I am not sure if it would actually make a difference or not but I feel like they may not be in sync with each other if the data rates differ.

9

Yeah, different animation to this one-off strip, thankfully. I agree that timing may still be an issue, particularly with bitbanging.

10

I’m not sure that timing will be an issue as all of the LEDs are updated each time you call FastLED.show. I’d be very surprised if you can start the next update without finishing the prior one for all of the LEDs.

11

I’m more worried about the timing during a single FastLED.show. I guess if it does them in serial then it’s pretty unlikely there’d be an issue, though.

I’m very close to adding the extra strip and reporting the results, but it’ll be a few days.