I currently have put together a 1 meter x 1 meter (30x30) matrix of RGB neopixels. its a great 900 LED pannel but obviously the refresh rate is less than 10 FPS…
Is it possible to hook up the expansion module and then feed the matrix with multipul data feeds and speed things up?
Hi @Patchlead,
Nice build!
WS2812/NeoPixels are unfortunately on the thorny side of LEDs to work with and tend to have lower FPS than other LEDs due to the protocol bandwidth limitations and buffering requirements.
You should be able to get some bandwidth improvements with an output expander. It can roughly double the bandwidth, and help Pixelblaze stream pixels instead of rendering to a buffer, then flushing the buffer sequentially. Splitting it up into 2-4 sections will help parallelize the output to the pixels.
You can experiment with a few options to see where the bottleneck is, and try different LED options.
Change the LED type to No LEDs to test the pure computational performance.
Or, switch to the Output Expander option, add a board, and experiment with settings and FPS results.
You should see around 12-40 FPS for 1000 pixels. It depends a lot on the pattern.
I should also mention that a Pixelblaze V3 would be right at home for that sized installation, and for most patterns you’d be looking at 30-65+ FPS with it (LED limitations aside).
