Hi, I'm looking at creating a Christmas display this year at my house. I have been waiting for a lighting controller to come back in stock but I am having no luck. I am wondering whether I could use multiple Arduinos to control the show using ART-NET through a program called xLights.
My long term (many years) goal is to have 20,000+ lights on display. How many lights can an Arduino handle per port (or per board over multiple ports)? It may be cheaper and easier to do it this way. The show would run at either 20 or 40 frames per second as per xLights. I want to have the option to run my shows at 40fps but will most likely only use 23fps because of smaller file sizes and less hassle.
Also, what program would I have to upload to the Arduino to achieve this?
Thank YOU!!
There are many different kinds of Arduino. The simplest and most common can only handle around 500 ws28xx LEDs, and with most libraries for those types of LEDs, splitting them across ports does nothing to speed up the refresh rate.
Have a look at Teensy 3.x boards. They are Arduino compatible and I remember there is a library and an adaptor that can drive 8 sets of LEDs in parallel to speed up the refresh rate.
Start small. Get yourself an Arduino and some pixel strips, install FastLed or the Adafruit Neopixel library and play. Then there will be so fewer questions.
This is a pretty interesting topic to me. Glad @PaulRB mentioned a library for this. A Quick google search lead me to this site, which may take my own project in a little bit different direction.
Odd time to be seeing such a request - more conventionally, I'd expect to see this in mid December, perhaps at the end of November if someone was thinking ahead. Nice work
