Hi, first of i don't have much experience with Arduino.

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1

Hi, first of i don’t have much experience with Arduino. I have a 60 LED WS2812 LED Strip which i am controlling with an Arduino Meg 2560. After some testing with the FastLED libraries (which are awesome!) I noticed the speed is really slow. I programmed a simple code which turns all leds on and after finishing that turns all of them off repeating this. The Problem is, I only get around 4 of these Cycles per Second which is awfully slow. Here is the Code which is in the void loop.

for(int dot = 0; dot < NUM_LEDS; dot++) {
leds[dot] = CHSV( 100, 255, 255);
FastLED.show();
}
for(int dot = 0; dot < NUM_LEDS; dot++) {
leds[dot] = CRGB::Black;
FastLED.show();
}

Is there any way to speed this up?

2

don’t do FastLED.show() inside the for() loops. Do it only after you’ve updated all the LEDs for a “frame” of your animation.

3

So to be clear that I’m understanding:
You’re reporting:
60 “ons” and 60 “offs”, four times per second =
(60+60) * 4 updates per second =
480 updates per second, 480Hz.

But in fact, each ‘update’ is updating all 60 of your pixels, so you’re seeing a net speed of about 28,800 pixels per second – which is pretty much right up against the hardware speed limit for WS2811 and WS2812 LEDs.

To put it another way, it sounds like FastLED is already driving your LEDs at the maximum speed they can handle.

Now: if you want your animation to appear to ‘move’ faster, you have a lot of choices. Unless you’re trying to do POV displays, I bet you’ve already got enough speed. (And if you are trying to do POV displays, you’ll need fasted LEDs, e.g. LPD8806’s. )

What specifically are you trying to animate, and how do you want it to look?

4

@Luca_Luchinger Correct. You can mess around with the leds[] array all you want, and it won’t change what’s displayed until you do FastLED.show()

5

Great! Glad you’re getting the hang of it! And Thanks, @Tod_Kurt !