For the future Turtle Antenna, I’m using 16 of these “flex led” strips. Each strip is 5 meters of WS2815 in a nice IP68 frosty silicone sleeve which creates beautiful, diffuse pastel colors. They are 60 pixels per meter so I’m using a total of 4800 LEDs.
If you asked me a year ago I would have said that this year I’d be using ESP32s as controllers.
Teensy 4.1 is a game changer.
Here I’m running:
- 4800 LEDs (WS2815b)
- 107 frames per second
- 16 strips, in parallel, each on their own pin
- RAM used 111284 bytes (21%)
- CPU load: negligible
- Peak AC power consumption (full white) 500 watts / 6amps
- For each WS2815b strip of 300 12v LEDs, I am only injecting power once at the bottom.
The prototype breadboard here shows one Teensy 4.1, two level shifters (8 strips each), and four RS422 encoders (4 strips each). Then I drive the signal over CAT5 to a tiny RS422 decoder board. The whole RS422 thing is not necessary if your controller is within about 5m of your strips. I haven’t tried going further but I would not be surprised if you could run 20,000 pixels at 60fps off of one Teensy 4.1…. without using any kind of shift register or extra hardware.
Clik here to view.
