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arduinoledfastled

Controling above 512 LED's with arduino and FASTLED


I am making an LED board that will have approximately 900 individually addressable LED's (WS2812B)

From my experiments, I think I can't safely control about 512 LED's before I start to exhaust an Arduino UNO's modest memory and getting strange behavior.

The most obvious solution to me would be to use an Arduino Mega, but its physical size is not really suitable for my project.

Is it possible to link multiple Arduino units together and use them to control a larger amount of lights and synch them together to act as one? I have read about IC2 but I cannot find any examples of anyone using it in conjunction with FASTLED, so my feeling is it probably doesn't do what I think.

Can anyone point me towards the solution to this problem?


Solution

  • There are very small Arduino-compatible controllers available which have a lot more memory than the Arduino UNO. I have had success with Cortex M4-based boards like the AdaFruit Feather M4. I'm seeing a lot of people switching to the ESP32-based boards, and right now I'm experimenting with the Teensy 4.0 which is a Cortex M7-based board that is incredibly powerful compared to a traditional Arduino.