Replace NeoPixel library with FastLED in ESPEasy

[papperone]

Just a small poll to get feedback; we are sticking all our addressable plugins with Adafruit NeoPixel library, while FastLED offers similar features but support a wider range of other addressable LEDs as per official doc:

Code: Select all

Here's a list of all the LED chipsets are supported.  More details on the led chipsets are included *TODO: Link to wiki page*

* Adafruit's DotStars - AKA the APA102
* Adafruit's Neopixel - aka the WS2812B (also WS2811/WS2812/WS2813, also supported in lo-speed mode) - a 3 wire addressable led chipset
* TM1809/4 - 3 wire chipset, cheaply available on aliexpress.com
* TM1803 - 3 wire chipset, sold by radio shack
* UCS1903 - another 3 wire led chipset, cheap
* GW6205 - another 3 wire led chipset
* LPD8806 - SPI based chpiset, very high speed
* WS2801 - SPI based chipset, cheap and widely available
* SM16716 - SPI based chipset
* APA102 - SPI based chipset
* P9813 - aka Cool Neon's Total Control Lighting
* DMX - send rgb data out over DMX using arduino DMX libraries
* SmartMatrix panels - needs the SmartMatrix library - https://github.com/pixelmatix/SmartMatrix

Making this efforts will make all plugins abstract from the hardware, so if the author of FastLED will add support for more led it will be enough to recomplie the ESPEasy BIN and voilà!

What's your thought? woudl it make convenient the initial efforts to convert all existing plugins? Converting just some won't be effective as BIN will include 2 libraries code so if we agree this is a right move all coders involved in NeoPixle based plugin shoudl be able to convert them to FastLED, else not sure it can make sense...

[grovkillen]

Sounds like a good idea. Got my support. +1

[Shardan]

More supported devices is always good.

[toffel969]

Sounds like a great idea

[papperone]

Looking more into LEDs, controllers and library it seems we have as well another potential candidate "NeoPixelBus" which seems supporting less type of LEDs but it's much faster!
I was surprised that in the GitHub of the author he's mentioning Psy0rz as he realized a very nice LED Animation sketch that supports both FastLED or NeoPixelBus; I admit I really like this "ledanim" project as you can customize it writing your own animation behaviour in javascript so I wonder if Psy0rz is considering to convert his project into an ESPEasy plugin

[DeKraker]

Will the fastLED library be included in the next stable release?
If FastLED will be implemented, is there any idea on timing?

I can't find any information concerning fastLED on the Github page.

[EmKa]

any news on this?