Hi
Thank you for the reply as always , I finally narrowed the system down to 120 strips with 30 leds per strip, a total of 3600 LEDs of ws2811 or WS2812B planning to use teensy++2 which will hopefuly give me 40 strips per controller. Am I correct thinking that (use 40 out of 46 digital pins)?
Then the question I have is, can I control THREE Teensy++2 controllers
to rune a single code. if so how could I do that. if not
how could I achieve this.
thank you for any help.
Your frame rate is going to be terrible. Use Teensy 3’s and you can drive 16 strips off of each one in parallel. Also, because of the way fastled optimizes, driving 40 strips of output on a single teensy++2 is likely to run you out of flash memory for storing your program.
Some quick math - 40 strips of 30 leds per strip - 1200 leds to update per frame, or 36ms per frame. vs. if you used parallel output on the teensy 3.1, it would be 16 strips written out in parallel in 1ms.
Also - the teensy++2 is still an AVR based chip, so you are going to have the same issues with sync’ing and moving data around as Paul mentioned in your other post.
You should really be using an arm based setup for what you want to do - and it should be teensy 3.1’s.
Thanks for the quick reply Daniel.
so I will have to use 8 Teensy 3.1s to run 120 strips each running 15 strips. that’s fine but how do I sync all 8 to run one code?
any suggestions would be much appreciated
thanks
I’d suggest you look at the example code provided with the OctoWS2811 library, which includes code for synchronizing output across multiple teensy3/3.1’s.
http://www.pjrc.com/teensy/td_libs_OctoWS2811.html#videodisplay
Note that if you want to use OctoWS2811 to fully have the pushing of led data in the background then you’ll be limited to 8 strips per teensy 3.1.
Are you going to be generating the led data/content on a computer and sending it to all the controllers? If so, then honestly, at this point what you should really be looking at are the fade candy boards - because they give you a combination of hardware and software that you can use to have a single computer drive all the led data across 15 fade candy boards. You would just need a honking big usb hub 
Thanks Daniel
I will get started on this and post the progress.
this is exactly what I needed to see.
Also, as @Mark_Kriegsman and I are fond of saying, it’s a good idea to learn to walk before you try flying. I’d suggest scaling up slowly - from your questions it’s clear there’s a lot that you need to learn, and doing a series of scale up projects where you’re doing a couple of them at a time, vs. all of them in one giant shot - it’ll save you a lot of frustration.
I agree with @Daniel_Garcia : I’d try building a small one to “get the hang of it”, and to learn what seems easy and what seems hard after that.
What would be a good “starter size” to test it do you think?
Thank you Daniel/Mark
precisely, will start small scale and finish the project if every thing work to plan.
Also found out Teensy 3.1 can run 1000 LEDs easily.
will most definitely come back for your valued advise as I face with new challenges.
Hi @Daniel_Garcia , I was under the impression that Teensy 3.1 only provided 8 lines of parallel output.
Re-read the Parallel output on WS2811 section of the FastLED docs and that does not mention 16 parallel output. Can you confirm this ?
Also, your comment above explains 1200 LEDs with 36ms per frame, but I guess you meant 2.25 ms if you can indeed have 16 strips in parallel !?
My computation was referring to the use of a teensy++2 which can’t do parallel output, as for the reference to 16-way output, on the parallel wiki:
WS2811_PORTDC - pins 2,14,7,8,6,20,21,5,15,22,23,9,10,13,11,12 <-- 16 pins, no soldering onto pads on the back!
Thanks @Daniel_Garcia ,
I did notice that line in the wiki but due to the exclusive mention of 8 line parallel output specs in the rest of the write-up and the absence of a clear mention of 16 lines parallel output, I assumed (wrongly now I see) that these were only 2 alternative 8 pin sets, similar to the way you described the two sets of HW SPI pins on Teensy 3.x a while back !
The application will not require any video inputs or graphic representation, but few patterns to move horizontal and vertical.
Is there is a better way to achieve this other than running 120 strings vertically with 30 LEDs per string and connecting 8 Teensy controllers?
Was thinking of running 30 strings (15 parallel lines per controller, will only need two Teensy3.1s) with 120LEDs per string, but then face the difficulty of running patterns vertically down the 30 strings. Or is there a way around this?
Any suggestions please