What are the absolute brightest LEDs that FastLED can control?
I suppose it just depends on what circuit you’re using to drive them.
What do you mean by circuit exactly? The circuit to power them? I’m looking to build some lighting for the exterior of a truck and it’d be great to have them as bright as possible. I can get up to 12 volts for powering them, I’m not so concerned about how much amperage they require, since automotive batteries can discharge pretty good amounts of amperage.
I am also wondering which RGB LED strips are the brightest ones available.
This question is a little bit like: what’s the spiciest hot dog I can put in these FastLED brand buns.
FastLED doest know anything about the photonic output of the LED it controls.
I think most of the led chip are 5050 type, the ic drive those 5050 leds may have curent limit to 15mA per color (45mA total)
The max brightness is very much depend on those specification.
If you’re willing to skip individually addressable LEDs to could still use FastLED to control the RGB channels of 12v LED strips (the ones where all LEDs are always the same color). These aren’t necessarily brighter though, unless you get a strip with pixels that are WWW instead of RGB.
If you’re willing to try something even further from standard FastLED useage (and perhaps non RGB), you could install a 12v DC to 110v AC converter on the vehicle and use FastLED to toggle relays to toggle some really bright house hold sort of LEDs. Those could absolutely be brighter then your 5050 package pixels on your 5v strips.
You might need to be even more specific in what you want to do. 
Have a poke around Ray Wu’s site; as @Nail_ENVY says, the controller chips FastLED supports are usually found connected to 5050 LEDs which pull somewhere around 45-60mA per RGB pixel on full white. But you can get modules with multiple 5050 LEDs ganged up on one controller chip, giving you three, four, six, eight (etc) times the brightness for each pixel. Lots of these run natively on 12V too.
I’m actually investigating a way to drive a whole heap of common-anode RGB strip (the kind that runs only one colour per strip and doesn’t include integrated controllers). I’ll post about my findings once my parts have arrived and I’ve had time to experiment.
@Luminous_Elements i’ve done this using FastLed on an atmega328, i used mosfets to drive the led strip, i built the whole circuit on veroboard. I actually got mixed up with the strip being common cathode/anode so i had to lift the leg of the transistor and solder the strip between. so she aint pretty, but she works.The strip came with a cheap Chinese remote, and i didn’t like the white (it was too blue, and flickery). FastLed let me “mix” my own white using 3 pots.
Responding to the original question, remember that you can use the individual controller chips like the WS2801 chip or the WS2811 chip that are not integrated into an LED package, then it will receive the FastLED data stream and give you access to the RGB individual PWM outputs…once you have those PWM outputs, then you can use any LED driver to control any LED…even bigchip LEDs like these from Luminus Devices…
http://www.luminus.com/products/mix.html
I made a prototype once using their CBT-120 LEDs which can do 18amps continuous and 30amps pulsed…
http://www.luminus.com/products/CBT-120.html
You really, really need to manage your thermals and inductance when using these and the drivers that National had made for them.
Lastly, keep in mind that Automotive really isnt 12vdc, it is 6-18vdc with the potential for nasty transients called “load dump”. Let me know if you want more info or help on the automotive side, because I design automotive modules for some clients. Good luck!
Holy SHIT! How much are those things?!
(Also, are they really 5mm by 5mm square?!)
@Robert_Atkins “Chip emitting area: 4.6mm x 2.6mm”
Aha, that makes more sense. Very pricey though.