Well having sorted the glitching issues with the 74HCT245 and cat5e the infinity posts now look great! A total of 4208 leds all controlled by a single Teensy 3.1 using FastLED and parallel output.
Wow very nice
love the level shifter mounting arrangement under the Teensy, i’m gonna steal that idea.
Where is this arcade?
That’s very, very slick, Aaron. Congratulations.
Thanks 
It’s in Great Yarmouth on the east coast of the UK. I only drive 3 strings on the Teensy, all the edges are duplicates of 152 leds, the front/back faces are 381 leds and the side faces are 367 leds.
I will post a video once I can get in the arcade out of hours as the phone picks up the machine reflections too much.
BTW The sketch size is just under 14k and uses under 13k of ram.
Wow! I love the design of these posts!
And tips or lessons-learned to share?
Great great looking build!
WOW… Looks awesome… Very well done !!!
Really Nice !!!
Excellent. Turned out fabulous!
I would really like to know what kind of frame rates you are getting on the Teensy? Video?!?!?!?!?!?
The main lesson learned, use 74HCT245’s!!!
I routed a 1mm deep / 10mm wide channel in the frame between the mirror and the glass which greatly helped with mounting the led’s in a perfectly straight line. The Teensy is socketed so it can easily be removed from the ceiling for updating.
I’m not sure of the frame rate, will have to get the scope out and strobe a digital pin to check. I’m only really driving 381 led’s as I am using parallel output.
The static pic looks good but really need to get a video posted to give the full effect, just need to go very late at night when the other machines are turned off!
Good chance you’re getting at or near 60 fps at least if your generating code isn’t too heavy! I’ve successfully pushed 4000 at 60(limited to that for other reasons) using 3.1 and fast led
Beautiful project!
So @Jon_Burroughs & @Lucas_Morgan I dug out my scope and am getting 77 fps, that’s approx 1ms processing and 12ms for FastLED.
Quick update! Having had it pointed out where I was going wrong, I now have it running with the Octo parallel output. It now reaches 95 fps.
A better way to think about the division of time (two comments up) is 1ms for CPU processing and 12ms waiting for the (slow) LEDs to absorb the data. This is why we say some LEDs are slow and some are fast; the APA102s can absorb data as fast as we can pump it out, while each string of WS2811-style LEDs can only absorb it at a much slower speed. This is also why parallel is such a win for WS2811s, and doesn’t make nearly so much difference for LEDs that are basically fast already.
In any case, 95FPS sounds pretty good! How’s it look? (Can’t wait to see video of these things!)
I do like the look of the APA102s but don’t like the price 
The next project I am looking at is a 720x24 matrix using three Teensy 3.1’s, thats 288m at 60/m! It will mainly be used for messages and sprite animations so I am hoping to achieve 50 fps.
I will hopefully get a chance to video the infinity posts this week as I need to do it around 1-2am when the other machines are off!
I’ve been seeing (almost) comparable prices for APA102 and WS2811. My complaint with the APA102 world right now is that I can’t get as many different pre-fabbed forms and styles and packages. It’ll come.
I know it’s a while since you posted this Aaron, but I was in Great Yarmouth yesterday on holidays and saw these, they still look awesome!