How to use FastLED to show texts and movies

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rumenigg

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Hello there.
I'm trying to build my led display with LED Strips, 52LEDs/m LPD8806 5050SMDs, and teensy 3.1 but I don't know to use the library FastLED to developer the software controller.
I even set my led strips in a 52x30 matrix.
I tried to do something but I just got change the colors of smds, but I want to show texts, movies, pictures, ads, etc.
I'm starting with a small display but in the future I'll build a large LED Display.
Thank you.
 
The FastLED library gives you the ability to control the pixels.

To draw text, you're going to have to add code which reads a font and draws the individual pixels. For example, this code exists in the Adafruit GFX library. FastLED isn't designed to work directly with Adafruit's library, but if you look at Adafruit's code, you'll see there's a fairly simple drawChar() function, which in turn calls drawPixel().

https://github.com/adafruit/Adafruit-GFX-Library/blob/master/Adafruit_GFX.cpp#L391

You could try using this code, of course with modification to replace drawPixel() with code to change the pixels on FastLED.


Likewise for pictures and video, you'll need to add code to do these things. For video, you might look at my OctoWS2811 library. There's a sample Arduino sketch and Processing sketch for communicating video from a PC to the buffer on Teensy. Again, you can't use that code exactly as-is, because it was made for OctoWS2811 instead of FastLED. But the idea is basically the same, but the buffer may have a different arrangement, so some editing in the Processing code would be needed.


As far as I know, there are no simple ready-to-use examples, but there is plenty of code out there for other libraries that can be adapted, so at least you don't have to build all the font drawing and video playing code from scratch. Some work is required, but hopefully this helps?
 
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