I have a small project where I have about 120 NEOPIXEL’s at a solid, constant brightness and hue. Is it “best practice” to constantly send data to the LED’s, or just send the hue and brightness info once, during the setup() ?
I should use the analog RGB’s but, this rig will be surely updated as my programming evolves.
As with all things, it “depends” - if you are going to have a high dynamic range between brightest/darkest pixel, and you’re setting the brightness pretty low, then to take advantage of dithering you’ll want to be calling FastLED.show() pretty frequently (even if you aren’t changing the leds).
Every LED will be max brightness, same hue.
If you’re going to do that, neopixels are a horrible waste of money, cost wise. You can buy rgb led strips where the individual pixels aren’t addressable for a fraction of the cost.
Ah - missed your first comment on this post (not sure why i didn’t see it when i replied). In that case, doing it in setup should be fine.
Periodically calling show might be useful in case something happens and power to the leds gets reset.
I know, I am incorporating LEDs into my prop business. The client, will surely want to reuse the rig in the future, so I am setting myself up for easier work in the future.
When I did my test’s, the LEDs were getting a bit toasty at full brightness while sending data. I was just wondering if there was a more better way.
(just remember to not call show more than 300-400 times/second 
I’m working on learning how to put my Arduino to sleep and wake upon interrupt. When it wakes, I will push the data back out and show it, then it’s back to sleep. Thanks for the idea, that’s the kind of stuff I was looking for!