Has any one done light painting with FastLED? I have built a rig to do some using the ADA fruit set up but it isnt’t bright enough. I have attached an image which I took last night. I live in Vietnam and the street lights get turned off at night, but the image is still too dull.
If you’re sure the lights are bright enough (which they should be at even 50% brightness) then it might be down to your camera settings and/or the speed you’re doing it at. I’m no photographer but I’ve done lots of digital light painting and found it worked fine in even quite well lit areas at night, I used a very low ISO setting and a fairly high f-stop, each image took roughly 2-6 seconds of exposure time as well. Low ISO - less sensitive, high f-stop - lets less light in, exposure time - longer means more light gets in. There’s one other thing to check beyond camera stuff and the leds being set at full/appropriate brightness - the source image -make sure it’s not incredibly dim in a photo editor before you load it up. I probably have some examples that I could find with the camera settings I used but it would take some digging so experiment with your camera in the meantime and if you’re still stuck I can show you a pic or two and tell you the exact settings and camera used.
The image I posted of Spiderman was taken at F3.2 with a 10 second shutter and 100 ISO on a prime 35mm lens on my Nikon D7000. I don’t think it’s the photography.
I am using 3 Samsung ICR18650 batteries through a 12V to 5V step down regulator to power 144 LED on a WS28112 strip via an Arduino.
found this in the code which had each LED at 20mA mine are rated at 10mA so I changed it
if(brightness) {
lineMax = (lineMax * 10) / 255; // Est current @ ~10 mA/LED
if(lineMax > CURRENT_MAX) {
actually I think it was user error…I misundrrstood where the high brightness ppint wss for the potentiometer.