Author Archives: Blinky Lights Blogger

The Story So Far In investigating how to drive enormous numbers of WS2812b LEDs from Arduino-style controllers at 60 fps or faster, I found that a pretty solid option is the Teensy 3.2 with the OctoWS2811 adapter board which can drive up to 4400 pixels. But what if you need more pixels? A common approachContinue reading “Interlude: BeagleBones”

Maybe you want to build something for a big thing in the desert. And the desert is wide and large and your thing is going to be really, really, big. For example, the Tree of Ténéré by Zachary Smith and team has 175,000 LEDs. That is significantly higher than the 4416 LEDs that you canContinue reading “So you need more than 4000 addressable LEDs”

If you’re just joining me, I’m trying to redo the LED lighting on this 46′-tall antenna: My earlier experiments were all about speed, trying to increase the frame rate from last year’s abysmal 17 Hz to something better than 60 Hz. I decided I could easily double the number of LEDs and use single TeensyContinue reading “APA102c versus WS2815 LED Strips”

I found an easy way to measure the exact frame rate you’re getting on your WS2812b animations using an oscilloscope.

Oh man, this thing looks amazing. No sooner had I soldered pins on the Teensy 3.2 than a newer Teensy 4.0 arrived in the mail. The new Teensy is insanely more capable for the same price and in the same form factor. It’s 10-15 times faster on benchmarks, has 16 times as much RAM andContinue reading “What about the Teensy 4.0?”

My first experiment in speeding up the LEDs is to use something called OctoWS2811 which is designed to let you drive 8 strips of LEDs in parallel. Theoretically, this would allow me to boost the speed of my antenna from the dismal 9 frames per second to a much more attractive 72 frames per second.Continue reading “The OctoWS2811”

One of last years’ projects was a 46′ tall antenna “wayfinder” that we used to find our camp from miles away. It was awesome, but next year I want it to be even awesomer.

This blog is about programmable LEDs, and making them fast and colorful and cool.