I’m about to start messing around with FastLED 3.1 on a nRF51822 based board (PTR5518, not RFDuino). Any tips? Do the clockless chipsets perform differently than the SPI ones? (Ws281x vs. apa102). Does FastLED play nice with the Nordic SoftDevice?
I will update with my progress but if anyone has any tips I would love to hear them
The clockless chips, on the nrf51822, don’t have dithering support - and it seems that they’re still fairly sensitive to compiler versions (I’m about to do a complete asm re-write of the clockless code for M0 base chipsets which will hopefully re-enable dithering support).
FastLED plays nicely with the nordic soft device, however the soft device is hell on interrupts. Some of the bluetooth interrupts take a full ms to process, and the device crashes if you take too long to service them. What this means is that if you have more than 60-80 WS2812 leds, the odds are pretty high that the leds on the end of your strip will update on a much much lower framerate.
Got it. So it sounds like either use ada102 or don’t use SoftDevice with clockless LEDs. Any example of a makefile / compiler version that plays nice with the current codebase?
Unfortunately, I don’t - I did the nrf51822 port for a bare makefile based build environment, but the build files are not mine to share 
I’m using the super new nRF SDK v8.1 and the latest build of arm gcc toolchain (4.9.3). I’ll share the build environment if / when I get it to work 
Ahh, my project was against nRF SDK v7.x (I hate that the soft devices are versioned separately)
@Daniel_Garcia I’m giving this another shot. The default nordic makefiles / startup code don’t support c++. Any recommendations for the relevant startup code? Thanks!
Hmm… never mind. I’ll use the redbearlabs arduino library for nrf51 instead of the default nordic files
Saw your post hit the git that you were able to use fastled in mbed for the NRF by using the redbear library, of course for some reason github is down so I can’t take a look now. But so I’m clear do you mean that you were able to use Fastled and compile it in the mbed IDE? If so I’d love to see a little more on how you did it or if you have an mbed repo showing how you got it to work.
I just used vanilla arduino ide but I do know the RBL core has mbed support. I exported the compiled hex from arduino ide and flashed it (and the s130 softdevice) using nrf51 DK. Happy to help with that!
Interesting, thats what I figured, I’ll take a look when github is back up. In the end what I’m really looking to get into mbed is all the great Fastled color functions and various utilities, I’m l using the simple SPI APA102 LEDs so all the trickier clockless chipset stuff isn’t necessary.