Which Controller for large LED project

[achillesbane@gmail.com]

Hello,
I'm working on a large LED project that will incorporate two types of addressable LED's.
I need something that can adequately address 100 Pixies (3W chainable Pixie LED's) as well as a quantity of 3600 addressable WS2812B (5050 LED's which are 5VDC strips), so about 1400W with 11100 bytes of RAM and 115,200 baud 8N1 for each pixie (the pixies will be chained together). I'm not looking for the power supply, I'm just looking to purchase a controller for programming and running all these addressable LED's. Will the The Teensy 3.2 and the OctoWS2811 adequately handle this? Is there anything that would be better? I'd like to get the best equipped and fastest type of controller possible.
Thanks

 

[PaulStoffregen]

I'm not familiar with these 3W "Pixie" LED products.

Teensy 3.2 definitely can manage 3600 WS2812B and also do 115200 baud communication at the same time on Serial1 and Serial2. But Serial3 conflicts with the pins used by OctoWS2811, and Serial3 lacks the efficient FIFOs of Serial1 & Serial2, so plan on only 2 serial ports.

If you're going to do complex animation on the Teensy, especially if using floating point numbers, then you would want to step up to Teensy 3.6. It's twice the speed and has a FPU. Likewise if you're going to feed an audio signal into Teensy's ADC and make the LED sound reactive, get the 3.6 so you have plenty of extra CPU power. Teensy 3.2 can do 1024 point FFTs (at 86 updates per second) while controlling 2000 LEDs (as the SpectrumAnalyzer example in OctoWS2811), but that taxes it pretty heavily and should give you a rough idea of how much processing power a 3.2 has available while also controlling the LEDs. For 3600 LEDs and FFT-based sound response you'd want the extra power of a 3.6.

For use where a PC will do all the animation and stream the data over USB, where Teensy just grabs the data from USB and send it out to all those LEDs, Teensy 3.2 is plenty. That sort of application is limited by the communication speed on USB and the LEDs, so the Teensy spends much of its time just waiting. 3.2 is plenty fast enough for just relaying data for 3600 LEDs.