I'm working in a very power constrained environment,

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1

I’m working in a very power constrained environment, I have 82 LEDs and am limiting the power consumption using the setMaxPowerInVoltsAndMilliamps function passing it 250ma as the limit. This works great, definitely limits the power, but I noticed that if I keep a block of pixels a fixed solid color, they will dim a little if I then set more pixels active elsewhere in the strip. Obviously this is the power management doing its thing correctly and lowering the overall brightness to maintain the 250ma limit. The problem is this dimming makes for a rather odd visual effect.

Anyone got any ideas how I can limit the power usage overall without this dynamic dimming? Would just tuning for the right max brightness value globally be the correct approach?

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That’s an interesting situation you’ve found. Yes, I see how that would be slightly distracting.
You could set master brightness to 0 and all LEDs to white, then slowly increase brightness while reading Amps with a multimeter until you get to/really close to 250mA (obviously while not using the setMaxPowerInVoltsAndMilliamps feature).

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It appears that if I just lower the max brightness then I can find a good balance where the max brightness of the LEDs does not require dimming. This is actually quite flexible as I can set it per animation.

4

Oh very nice. Quite easy to adjust and still allows nice brights in certain cases.