Replied to the DM.
For anyone else happening upon this thread this ended up being the same problem as Pixelblaze keeps restarting - #13 by wizard
Lots of small arrays being allocated, getting past memory checks, and causing a crash. Will be fixed in the next version!
Pattern CPU use doesn’t significantly contribute to heat, it would only make the framerate drop. Pixelblaze runs as fast as possible, so even simple patterns load up the CPU to 100% and it just spits out more FPS. Most of the power consumption and heat comes from WiFi.