hey guys! i am trying to light 1000 a single string of ws2811 string of pixels in just one second. so one every 1ms. is this eaven possible. om trying this out in the firstligt sketch. im using teensy 3.2. when using just 100 pixels, i can use 1ms delay. But the more pixels i have, the longer the delay seams to be.
The data for each ws2811 takes 30us to write - so when you have 1000 of them in a single line, that will take 30ms - just to write out the led data.
first of all, sorry for your loss.
is there any other pixel to use? ore any other technic to make this happend you think
Parallelise your output. That is the only way. The chips themselves in the LEDs have this limitation. So split it into 10+ parallel outputs and you might get it low enough. Alternatively switch to apa102 instead and it will be much faster.
To get 1000 leds updating 1000 times/second is 1,000,000 led updates per second - you need at least a 24Mbps data rate (aggregate, if you’re parallelizing output) - 32Mbps for apa102 (because it’s 32 bits of data per led). Most apa102 strips have problems running at higher clock speeds the longer they get.
Thanx you guys for your input. Im still lurning here.
You’re almost certainly going to need to change your animation code to draw in larger increments.
What does that mean Paul?
It means to redesign your animation. For example, if you have 1000 pixels and you wish to show 1 dot “move” from left to right over 1 second, instead of a rigid design where you turn each pixel on in sequence, you instead design it for 33 frames per second. That means you will not always turn on the next dot. Over 1 second, MANY of the LEDs will never light up at all. In fact, for 1000 pixels and 33.3 frames/sec, you will turn on every 30th LED for each update. Or perhaps if you want to show a sense of movement, you might turn on some of the nearby LEDs partially for a “blur” effect. Over 1 second, you will get 33 updates and the dot will appear to move smoothly, even though many of the LEDs were never used.
You are a genius