So I just made a big (for me) order at Adafruit, and have already gotten most of it (the other bits were afterthoughts).
The big thing I got was one of their 32x32 RGB matrixes. This thing is pretty awesome, and it’s a shame FastLED won’t work on it, as it’s closer to parallel driven. I figure I’ll be using a Teensy 3.1 and the fadecandy/smartmatrix stuff.
The other cool thing I got was their Bluefruit EZ-Link board. This thing is AWESOME. Plugs in like an FTDI, can program an arduino by BT, and is a transparent serial link - Serial.print() just passes right through, and there are no libraries, it just plain works.
Now I have to come up with a use for this stuff! 
I have one of the 32X32 boards, plus the SmartMatrix shield to use with the Teensy 3.1. It’s fun, although I also have yet to figure out something useful to do with it. 
At some point, I’d love to connect four of them horizontally and make a ridiculous reader board.
I’m actually amused by the fact that the bigger 32x32 board is half the price of the small board.
I’m thinking I’ll find a ridiculously fancy frame for this display, and do stupid things with it.
Eh - fadecandy won’t work with that matrix as well. The leds on that board don’t have pwm - so the host/driver has to manage the pwm on it as well.
That’s the reason why that board is cheaper - the smaller boards, each rgb led is a neopixel, so each led pixel does its own pwm. With the larger board, the host controller is responsible for managing the pwm on each led, hence the need for dedicated hardware for running it, but it also means that each led can just be a dumb 5050 rgb led. It’d be tempting to write support for the Smart Matrix in to FastLED - but I suspect this is one of those things that unless someone ships me a set to support, I’m unlikely to chase down on my own.
Actually, the smaller boards are identical hardware wise… They are interchangeable. If you look at the smartmatrix site, they have docs on getting it working. I’m phone posting right now, but when I get home I’ll post links.
Ah, i was comparing the 32x32 board to the 16x16 or 8x8 neopixel based boards. The 32x32 smart matrix based boards are not interchangable with the neopixel based boards, however.
Right. So no FastLED for them! Which is a shame, really.
If someone gets me a set and the controller I can do up a connection - however, I think it only makes sense to support an external controller through fastled. Not sure I want to get back into doing host-side PWM management into the library (the whole point of the move from FastSPI_LED to FastLED was to get rid of that code, well, maybe not the whole point
That said - as long as whatever library you are using takes r/g/b values, there’s no reason why you couldn’t use the rest of fastled (the math functions, the color functions, etc…).
Well, the SmartMatrix library is sort of based off Adafruit_GFX as far as language constructs go (similar keywords, drawing functions, etc). The SmartMatrix board actually doesn’t have any logic on it, it’s just making it a LOT easier and cleaner to connect to this panel. I could probably have it up and running tonight if I was feeling up to it.
Hi, SmartMatrix author here. I’ve been following FastLED and the cool projects the community is making here since I learned about the library earlier this year. Getting FastLED compatibility for the SmartMatrix Library is something I’d love to work on.
I haven’t had time to look at the FastLED code in depth enough to have ideas on how to integrate the two. The SmartMatrix Library takes care of doing 24-bit color and brightness control. It’s doing some complicated stuff with DMA to get the refreshing to run mostly in the background.
Daniel, I’d be happy to send you a display and controller board. Mark hasn’t posted on this topic yet, but I could send him one too. Let’s discuss over email, either through Google+, or my name @http://pixelmatix.com.
Noel and Dave, I hope you find something cool to do with your displays! Check out the forums or the original Dangerous Prototypes thread for some ideas. There are several contributors working on an IR-remote controlled animation, GIF, and game player sketch right now. I’d love to see animations using FastLED added to the sketch.
http://www.pixelmatix.com/forum/
http://dangerousprototypes.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=56&t=6125&p=56311
Thanks for the links (and the SmartMatrix project) Louis. I’ll read them over the weekend.
@Louis_Beaudoin1 emailed w/info.
Hate to be a killjoy, but those Adafruit matrixes are ridiculously expensive. You can buy a 16x16 matrix direct from WorldSemi with WS2812 LEDs for $60. Works great with FastLED.
SmartMatrix Superuser @Jason_Coon got some FastLED code running with the SmartMatrix Library. He posted on here but I’m not seeing his post for some reason. I can get to it from the link here:
https://plus.google.com/+JasonCoon1/posts/2wxAATRX54v