Preliminary testing has been interesting!
Merged code here, with a few changes:
Right now I’m just testing with a hack to swap out apa102 with the NS108 driver, using the same 8 + 3 bit color. Let me know if you want a build to play with.
These will update at 40MHz on Pixelblaze, which is quite impressive. It’s way overkill, even a trivial pattern like the example rainbow don’t benefit beyond 8MHz. I think 20MHz might be useful for patterns entirely from a buffer, but marginally so.
In addition to a crazy high data rate, they latch and display very quickly. I was able to see at least 5000FPS (only 18 pixels, but still).
The sad news is that the LEDs I used are either bad or had absorbed a lot of moisture even with a sealed pack + baking, and out of 4 8x8 panels every panel is bad, with 1/3rd to 2/3rds usable.
I’m also seeing some per-pixel variations that might be caused by damage. Some weird things / glitches happen for some of the LEDs in the first 10 or so levels.
The brightness around the lowest range is really good for most things and on par with APA102 even without the extra 5 brightness bits. With the extra bits, it would be hard to see them fade to blank unless you were in pitch black and looking right at them.
The extra bits aren’t directly compatible with SK9822 / APA102. Looks like they have a range of 3-34 out of 34 instead of 0-31 out of 31.