Hi FastLED, So Im hoping to start a project soon building a POV staff.

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Hi FastLED,
So Im hoping to start a project soon building a POV staff.
I am pretty much a total beginner with microcontrollers (i programmed an electronic drum kit for arduino uno but nothing more) and basically wanted some community input before i start purchasing stuff.

as far as i can tell the led strip to go for is the APA102c, but beyond that im not 100% on anything. should i go for the teensy 3.2 or the trinket pro? are these micro controllers capable of reading the POV images off an SD card and display them in a performance setting?

theres a lot of information out there and lots of really awesome people doing really awesome stuff, but its all kind of muddled together and leaves me a little confused, any input from you guys would be greatly appreciated. :slight_smile:

Thanks all

*sorry for my username, its an artifact from when google incessantly tried to force me to change my youtube username to my actual name (used to do it maybe 3 times a day) and eventually it bugged me so much i changed it to this, now i dont seem to be able to get rid of it :stuck_out_tongue:

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You are correct, you’ll definitely want APA102c for doing POV.
And I would recommend spending the few dollars more for the Teensy. Faster and more memory which only seems like a good thing for doing POV. I have not used an SD card with one but that should totally be possible as well. Of course you’ll hit a limit at some point if you’re trying to read huge images at too high a rate but you’d have to work that out with whatever setup you put together. Get the Teensy and enjoy.

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Yep you definitely want Teensy 3.1/3.2 for much better performance and more ram. I’m doing similar thing (pov display for a bike wheel) and it is capable to update [235]x[35] matrix of led data and display 4x35 leds at refresh rate about 700us.

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Great, thanks for the response guys, sorry for replying back so late, i thought id already responded but apparently not :stuck_out_tongue: