my LED vendor is now offering RGBW with SK6812B integrated into the led, and im definitely ordering some… I know that fastled supports the SK6812B, and is supposedly a 2812 variant, but, other than brute force setting the rgb(w) values a byte at a time (and ditching most of the color functions inherent to fastled) is there a quick & temporary way to get this working as an RGBW pixel and still use color constants and other color helpers?
Daniel i saw an earlier post that you had some strips on order, and were working on this - how is that going? would be happy to send you (more) strips if it would make things easier.
It’s going to take some time to fully support RGBW strips. I have some ideas for things people can do in the meantime to forcibly work around it that i need to try and write up - but supporting RGBW as well as RGB (and making it as transparent as possible for library users) is going to be a large project.
The problem/blocker isn’t access to strips, it’s simply time.
i figured it was a massive undertaking to re-do, given how tight FastLed is currently.
I would LOVE some tips/tricks to work around it whenever you can muster. Im totally on another gig right now anyways and far away from my lab so no inherent rush - i was just putting the order in this week and wanted to cross my eyes and dot my tees before i forgot about it.
let me know if i can help in any way - and thanks as always for cranking out such awesome code, as well as being present and responsive to our posts on the forums! you rock!
What appeals to you about RGBW strips? What’s the actual practical advantage to you over RGB? What kinds of projects will have a big benefit from RGBW?
So far the only advantage that I can clearly see is that they can output more lumens per pixel – just more light (assuming you’re dealing with whites or desaturated colors). And this seems valuable to me particularly in two cases: one case where you’re trying to make ‘room lights’ which will be white-ish most of the time and where you want high brightness, and the other for stage/effect lights where sometimes you want to flash white as bright as possible (255,255,255,255).
But honestly so far that is the only advantage I can think of: they can make brighter white(ish) light because they have 33% more LEDs per pixel.
I’m sure I’m just overlooking something here, but “I don’t get it (yet).” So I’m asking!
What’s are the compelling advantages of RGBW? What could you do much better with RGBW that you can’t do very well today with RGB?
For me, RGBW is attractive because when making white with just RGB, it always looks anemic. And looks really bad if you’re filming subjects lit with it because of the peakiness of the emitted spectrum. So if you are looking to use LED strips as “colored illumination replacement”, RGBW is really handy. For instance, I make art lamps sometimes and have run an RGB strip and a white strip together to get good whites.
But the information model is difficult. It would be great from a programmatic level to be able to specify a RGB triplet and have the strip (or the library) separate that out into appropriate levels for RGB & W. I’ve tried it, it’s hard to get right. I’ve poked a lot at FastLED, marveling at its internals; changing it to support RGBW will be pretty huge.
Room lighting or anything other than mood lighting. We have been lighting our world with fire for all of time. We are programmed to see out lives in this way. I have quite a bit of LED lighting in my house but my project to make a dining room chandelier out of RGB strip was a failure because it made the food look horrible and there was no warmth to the space with that light.
Because it’s cooooool. But seriously, I’ve found a huge decrease in use of “dumb” 12V LED strips (in white or RGB), even in applications where dumb strips are a better solution. Maybe 5V is easier to think about than 12V? You can’t get 5V out of your USB port after all.
Roger…copy that 5x5. Answer is “for fun”, more or less.
Ok!
SO “Disco mode” was my answer too…BUT I then envision two distinct use cases: General lighting mode and disco mode.
In general lighting mode: you want good, bright white with a nice color.
In disco mode… maybe you don’t actually use the W LEDs??? (Except ‘automatically’ as part of HSV desaturation. Maybe. But let’s ignore that.)
I think where I keep coming around to is just what folks said above: there’s a “general lighting” use case and a largely distinct color/animation/disco use case, and the appeal of these strips is that you can make installations that can serve both use cases with one set of hardware.
It’s not like there’s a magic part of the spectrum that we’ll be able to access now that we couldn’t before. (Where are my RGB+Uv strips?!?) It’s just more lumens in the general lighting case, and integrated general lighting + disco lighting all in one.
