I have a really basic question:

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I have a really basic question:

What is the advantage of the FastSPI_LED library over the AdaFruit NeoPixel library?

I’m new to ardruino and the awesomeness of serial addressed LEDs. I worked on RGB LEDs using PWM on the coldfire architecture a few years ago, so I’m not a complete neophyte.

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I’m INCREDIBLY biased, but…!

  • FastLED has a master brightness control
  • FastLED supports more LED types
  • FastLED has good HSV color support as well as classic RGB
  • FastLED has much richer “pixel” data type (CRGB) with many useful methods like add-with-built-in-saturating-math
  • FastLED provides more high-speed math functions (eg sin/cos, 40X faster)

In short,

  • FastLED lets you write code faster, and makes your code run faster.

Dan and I are sort of obsessed with ease of use, memory optimization, performance, and performance, and performance.

On the other hand, Adafruit has a bigger support infrastructure, full-time employees, and an awesome commitment to community education. I love Adafruit; I use their hardware all the time, and think very very highly of them. (I’m currently at the Open Source Hardware summit, and just chatted with Limor “Lady Ada” and Becky Stern.) Great people, great mission, great company, great hardware and products. But our code runs faster, and lets you do more with it, faster.

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On the other side of things, there’s currently one case where you must use the Adafruit library, and that’s if you are working with an 8mhz CPU. I have a few projects that do, and really thats just because almost every project I do is with an arduino I’ve never used before :stuck_out_tongue: I have to try them all for some reason.

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  • FastLED supports more LED types
    is quite a key point. you learn one set of commands and how to use them, and then the next project uses a different type. this is like a universal library.
    and its fasssst!
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Ah, one more time that you’d have to use the adafruit code: ATtiny -based controllers. They don’t have the MUL(tiply) instruction and FastLED currently depends on it. We may support ATtiny in the future… but today we don’t.

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@Mark_Kriegsman good to know. I plan on driving led spotlights, 8X8 NeoPixel, with their Trinket. I guess FastLED is out.