Pixie Chroma, but way less RAM! (Like, 98% less!)
Let's say you have 20 Pixie Chroma boards, but you want to run them off of an Arduino Uno.
That's (70 * 20) = 1,400 LEDs.
Even worse, that's (1,400 * 3) = 4,200 bytes of RAM needed to store the RGB data!
How about reducing color resolution to single displays, dropping some of the more advanced features, and getting that exact scenario to run with just 299 bytes (14%) of dynamic memory on an Arduino Uno?
The biggest hurdle is that we can't store the display buffer whole, we have to take notes about what we'll see like text and color, and render it live to the LEDs one-at-a-time before completely losing it from our memory!
This still achieves around ~60FPS on a 4 Pixie (280 LEDs) display on a 16MHz micro, but without fancy animation anything above 10 FPS is fine for most projects. (Can you read unique text messages at greater than 10FPS anyways?)
Tested / working so far:
- ATMEGA168
- ATMEGA328P
- ATMEGA16U2
- ATMEGA32U4
- ATMEGA1280
- ATMEGA2560
- ATTINY45
- ATTINY85 (ATTINY*4 and 0-series not yet tested)
- RP2040 (133MHz only for now)
- ESP8266
Not working yet / planned:
ATTINY series- SAMD21
ESP8266- ESP32
- Teensy series