Hi,
Help needed 
Warning - coding question ahead…
Just getting started in this whole LED / teensy / arduino / FastLED / OctoWS2811 / micro coding world. So far have successfully put together a Teensy 3.1, using FastLED 3.1 library which talks to the OctoWS2811 library (for performance), with 8 strings of 288 WS2812B LEDs (16 lots of 1m x 144 LED). Can get all sorts of basic effects going, all very cool – & many many thanks to the people who put so many hours into putting this stack together!!!
This will ultimately be for an installation which consists of 8 strings end-to-end (ie a single long string of 2304 LEDs, split up into 8 equidistant segments) running around the perimeter of a room. No problem running this as a single long string, but for various architectural and aesthetic reasons, I want to be able to split this into a ‘main’ (large) and a ‘back’ (small) area, which I can then do different things with (eg dynamic display on main area, slow hue cycle on back area).
To make things easy, thought I could use something like this:
union {
CRGB leds[2304];
struct {
CRGB main_pelment[1920];
CRGB back_pelmet[384];
} ;
} splitleds;
Then I could operate independently on either of the splitleds.main_pelmet[ ] or splitleds.back_pelmet[ ] arrays whilst simply feeding fastled with splitleds.leds[ ] (eg FastLED.show(splitleds.leds)).
Does that make sense? Is this a reasonable way to proceed, or is there a better / alternative / simpler approach?
If it does make sense, then how would I actually do it, as the compiler throws all sorts of errors when I try to use the CRGB object in this manner. Interestingly enough, if I change the data types to, eg ints, then it compiles without an issue (but of course, doesn’t run) - so I’m guessing the concept is sort of ok but there’s some reason I can’t use CRGB like this???
Anyways, any/all help/suggestions much appreciated!!