For my next project, I’m considering using WS2812 LEDs, mainly because I want to try using the 144 LED per meter strips. The big question for me right now is actual real-world speed for these LEDs.
If I use these I’ll have somewhere between 500 and 1400 LEDs depending on which design I go with. I’m not doing any POV stuff so I don’t have super high speed frame rate requirements, but even at the theoretical max rate of 800khz, that will still result in frame rates in the 25-65fps range (or ~ 30,000 lps).
I know that at some point, FastLED will support parallel outputs, but for now I want to plan on a single strip. For people using these LEDs, what kind of lps numbers are you seeing. Do you think I’m crazy to try running this many WS2812 LEDs? BTW - this will be driven using a Teensy 3.1.
An approximate rule of thumb is that one strip of WS2811/12’s can receive 33,000 pixel updates per second.
So if the strip is 1,000 pixels long, you can’t update more than about 33 times per second (max!).
If the strip is only 100 pixels long, you can do about 330 updates per second (max).
And as always, you can always de-rate all the numbers a little bit so you have some margin for error, but these are pretty realistic.
That’s helpful Mark, and it tracks with what I calculated. So then the question becomes - for simple patterns, what would you consider the lowest acceptable frame rate?
Well, movies run at 24fps, and they look OK. Much slower than that… and it really starts to depend on the animation itself.
Yeah. I think what I will do is go ahead with the WS2812 LEDs for now and keep to simple animations. Then if at some point parallel support gets added to FastLED, I can look at doing more complex animations. Thanks for the help!