I need to be able to run 900 WS2812B lights at 30+ frames per second. Currently, I’m using a ATMega328 to drive 300 at speed that seems already lower than that.
I also need to get the information from a data stream sent via computer (python Script) preferably over WiFi / Ethernet as Serial Doesn’t give me much room to expand. Serial also has the problem of range, as i need to have the lights, and the laptop over 35M apart.
Would the ESP8266 be suitable for this?
Each WS2812 led takes 30µs to write a single led’s worth of data. That means 900 leds is going to take you 27ms. Which means if you want to spend 81% of your CPU time just writing led data, you could get 30fps. Good luck getting any data sent in.
To drive that many leds at a decent frame rate you’re going to want something that supports parallel output, at the moment your best option for that is the teensy 3.2 - which can do 8 or 16 way output. That would cut your write time per frame down to 3.375ms or even 1.68ms.
I would suggest a teensy 3.2 paired with something like an esp8266 if you want the data coming in over wifi.