So just ordered 10,000 WS21812B. Got the power part down, but wondering of any of you had issues with Arduino/FastLED with that many?
I was thinking using a series of ESP units but not sure where the break point should be?
Work backwards from what frame rate you want - it takes roughly 30us to write out the data for one ws2812 led (if you’re using 4, 8, or 16-way parallel output then its 30us (plus some extra overhead) for 4, 8, or 16 or how ever many parallel output channels you’re using). I’ve done ~6000 leds that way.
@Daniel_Garcia Thanks very excited! Going to chant now. FastLED! FastLED!
I had something like 24 esp8266’s sync’d together. One of them was a master that sent out a heartbeat using udp multicast that everyone else used as a reference point for their pattern generation. Kept network usage stupidly low.
@Daniel_Garcia Too Funny! That is the same direction I am going. Using Art-Net (or E313 have not decided yet) and going to set up one as the master with several clients.
Was not sure if the little ESP guy could handle that much load to all the others though as I already melted two NodeMCUs. Not by power but data.
So I wasn’t sending frame data around - too expensive. 99% of my work is generative patterns - so the master would send out a small frame with a reference timecode, and about a dozen base parameters for an animation - and each node would adjust those parameters to the set of leds that it had and animate accordingly.
@Daniel_Garcia I will go in that same direction as well then as this will be my first larger scale attempt… Thanks for the tips! This is why I like FastLED so much!
@Darren_Hedlund I have 6000 ws2812b updated at 83fps (max) using 1 esp32 so I a do agree with @Daniel_Garcia define your target refresh rate that will determine your hardware setup. Can’t wait to see the result !!! What will be your power setup ? 10k leds is 600A max or 3000W. I guess you will limit the maximum brightness. (I am running my panel with 1200w or 240A max power setup instead of 360A but I try to never go full white at full brightness. And it’s really fine
@Yves_BAZIN Oh full brightness would be a monster. I will be toning it down about 65% brightness. Right now, I have 2 350w 60a 5v power supplies, and ordered 2 more. I plan to take advantage of black to blend in with the other gradients so that during full play 25% of the pixels will not be in use. That should cut down the draw to keep things nice and smooth and avoid white as much as possible.
I hear the esp8266 can’t receive at a high enough bandwidth to update a lot of LEDs. ESP32 may be a better choice. One reference says 20kBps: https://www.esp8266.com/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=245
Would be keen to see a video of them in action
@Darren_Hedlund I was able to use glediator and artnet protocol display on the led panel without too much of an issue. On the esp32 you can have one core dealing with the udp packets and the other one dealing with the display
@Daniel_Garcia Might need some pointers/links. Tried to run at least 512 pixels with Art-Net and the little adafruit 8266 kept maxing out on the data stream over WiFi unless I dropped the FPS to 10 and increased the Artnet buffer. Had a dedicated access point, no master/client (need to find how) and yet seemed to just hit a wall with too much data flowing in.
This is why I don’t send full frame data - too noisy! My control packets, sent 60 times/second were only 24 bytes, and that’s all that I was sending out over WiFi.
@Darren_Hedlund use en esp32 i have updated 6000 pixels with artnet at 23fps (the output of glediator)
@Yves_BAZIN (Slides the slew of ESP8266 to the side and begins to order more ESP32s).
I might have to have a giveaway on these when I am done! LOL
Glediator so far has hated me but will try again to figure it out.
Are you using LXDMXWiFi_Library?
@Darren_Hedlund no I took the artnet library and tweaked it. I am quite surprised ‘cause 512 pixels it’s like 3 universes. Increase the artnet buffer should not do anything but your udp buffer will. But normally it should be way enough as artnet packets are 512octets max. I will publish my code maybe you can try it and let me know. As for the glediator tool I admit it’s not the best do you have advice ?
@Yves_BAZIN Too funny, I was doing the same thing… Last night I was tweaking the buffer to 1060 & 1590 and changing my code around trying to find that sweat spot with the same bloody results. I have not played with the Udp buffer and did not see where to change that.
I would assume that would be UDP_TX_PACKET_MAX_SIZE
I also picked up some OLED to add in a display of the IP address and connection status.
I’ll upload what I have as well.
@Yves_BAZIN This is what I slapped together for testing.
https://github.com/microcyb/ARTNET_LED
@Darren_Hedlund https://github.com/hpwit/artnet here is my version look at the sketch ‘exampleartnet.ino’ in the examples of the Artnet library. the other sketch example will not work with my tweak