The scenario I want to avoid is having to touch the setup at all, so a switch works for development, but not that convenient on my bike setup: I’ve made the (perhaps questionable?) decision to power the strips through XT60 connectors, with the PB receiving power back along the 4-pin weatherproof connector. I’d have to unscrew, and plug in an auxiliary micro-USB to just the PB to gain access again.
Definitely something to think about for a future build—no time to change things up now.
I experimented with the approach I described in my post above and it seems to be working well. The only caveat is that, for some patterns, the brightness setting in the code depends on other parameters in the code. For example, a fire program, if the flames get higher up the strip.
Regarding the reboot loop, I found this documented here:
On the topic of documentation… I’ve found it to be good, but I was surprised that something as important as reboot loop detection was only posted to the forum, and not part of the official docs. Did I miss it elsewhere?