Hi folks,
A couple weeks back I asked if there was a Raspberry PI port of FastLED out there. The answer, sadly, was no, no such thing existed.
I spent a few days trying to fix that, and have come up with a port. There are several limitation:
- Only “clocked” LEDs are supported, those ones with a clock line aka 4-pins. LEDs like the WS2812, strips with only 3-pins, are not supported (yet).
- Hardware SPI is only supported.
- The port does not provide an Arduino-like framework - programming is not done using setup() or loop(), gpio interface routines are not provided, etc. However, delay, micros, and millis are support and weakly typed if you want to override them.
In theory the port should work on any Linux box, not just a RaspberryPI, as long as there is a SPI device driver that supplies a /dev/spidev* interface.
My test setup is a Raspberry PI zero running a 4.4.21+ kernel, and using a WS2801 200 LED count strand.
Check it out here:
See the README-LINUX.md file on how to compile and install the library.
The examples/LinuxDemo directory is a port of the DemoReel100 example for Linux.
I’d love some feedback on this.
Thank you,
– Michael
I’ve ordered an orange pi zero, I’m looking forward you trying this out on it. Thank you 
I finally got around to using this at my office. I have a couple of strips of WS2801’s I use on my desk, and then a bunch of Hue lights. Now I can coordinate the two, and I have a nice 8 button USB device so I can change on a whim. I’ll post a few pictures later (none now, secret device on my desk! ), but thanks for this. It was really nice to use a lot of my library of displays on the PI.
That’s awesome! Thanks for letting me know it worked…
Hey, finally got around to checking this out, was going to try to use it with a Pi Zero W and Pimoroni Unicorn pHAT. Sorry if I’m missing something obvious, but I can’t seem to find anything Pi related in that link.
I reinitialized my fork so I could make a pull request for the Teensy 3.1/2 SPI race condition fix that happens under heavy interrupt load.
The repository has been moved here :
Sorry about that. I’ll try to make a pull request for the Linux port later in the week.
No problem at all. Looks great, thanks! I hope to try it out soon.
This is exactly what I was looking for. Thanks! I’ll test it out and let you know if I have any problems with it.
Man, now I have to go buy some DIFFERENT LEDs!!
Bummer (not). Thanks!