YFYI: p44-ledchain drive v9 now supports 16-bit WS2816 LEDs
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Hi Onioneers,
I just got a bunch of WS2816 LEDs, which are similar to WS2812/13 but have 16bit PWM values instead of 8bits, so should have higher brightness resolution at low levels.
To test those, I upgraded my entire LED stack to 16bit capability, which includes the p44-ledchain driver for Omega2/MT7688 and the test utility p44ledchaintest.
Spoiler: with the chips I got, the higher precision does not help that much so far, because these start to emit light only at around PWM value 200 (and unevenly so between colors and individual chips), so the actual resolution is only a little better than the 8bits we're used to from WS2812,13,15.
But still, 9 or 10 bit resolution is better than 8, and future chips will most likely improve compared with the initial version (like WS2813 -> WS2813B...)
The WS2816 chips are not yet widely available, but you can get them for example from LCSC where I got mine.
@Lazar-Demin the v9 driver is fully backwards compatible, so could be included in the Omega FW. It also is a bit more efficient in memory usage - it only allocates the internal buffers on demand for the number of LEDs actually used (the previous version allocated according to the number specified at
insmod)
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Thanks @luz ! I've was offered these LEDs here locally in Oz and was wondering about compatibility.
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Cool! Thanks for the heads up @luz
I've made a github issue to track this update: https://github.com/OnionIoT/OpenWRT-Packages/issues/106
For now the plan is to make this updated driver available in the new 23.05 firmware.
Does anybody have a specific need to have this available in the older v0.3.4 firmware??
