Hi, I would love some guidance.

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Hi, I would love some guidance. I’m setting out to build a small scrolling ticker. My plan is to connect 8x1m strips to my ESP8266 board. I have experience with the ESP8266 just not with LED strips. From my research using FastLED + this library https://github.com/AaronLiddiment/LEDText seems like the way to go. I did some sketching of the basic wiring and wanted to get a second opinion before I continue.

Also in terms of how to progress, any recommendations? What should my milestones be? After I get one wire connected should I wire additional wires or start working towards text? Just curious how you’d recommend approaching this.

Thanks.

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Have you decided which type of LEDs to use? The ESP8266 works best with SPI type chipsets like the APA102 or SK9822 especially if you’re going to use a lot of them… Also I’m pretty sure there was another text based library/add-on posted on here recently.

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Well I already bought the LEDs WS2812Bs, hopefully that’s not going to cause too much of an issue. I read a few places about people getting them working. The Ticker won’t be too large (1m).

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How many LEDs per metre?

I’d use the parallel output, there was a problem with it but I believe it’s been fixed now. If not the fix is on here somewhere. You’ll also probably need to disable interrupts.

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Does my circuit look like a generally good starting point for first testing a single strip?

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It looks fine, on my phone, I can’t see which pin you’re using. On the WeMos D1 I use D5, D6, D7 and D8

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To answer your questions, its 60led/m strips. I assume I need 7 or 8 rows. However for scrolling text I would assume well less than 50% of the LEDs will be lit at the same time.

As for the pin, I currently have it drawn on GPIO2.

Any guidance is greatly appreciated.

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From a data point of view it doesn’t matter how many LEDs are on, just how many there are. As I said, use the parallel output as this cuts the time needed to write data to the LEDs by a factor of 4. This will make a big difference. Use GPIO pins 12 to 15 inclusive. Put a 1/4 of the strips on each pin