And if you are curious about my LED outfit, you can read more about it on my led peacock engineer medium post and if you'd like to read all my festivals or dreamstate, or clubbing posts, please click on the links higher on the page to get taken to those categories.
Both allow running your basic 2D code written either of Adafruit::GFX, and LEDMatrix, or 2D FastLED on your linux computer:
There is basic serial input/output emulation to allow you to interact with serial debugging on your arduino code when run on linux, and of course you can run the code under gdb.
You can find all the code and installation/usage instructions here: https://github.com/marcmerlin/FastLED_NeoMatrix_SmartMatrix_LEDMatrix_GFX_Demos
This is what it looks like when it's bigger:
As part of LCA 2020, I gave a quick talk at the Open Hardware Miniconf about a year's worth of work in ESP32 and upgrading my Shirt from 24x32 neopixels (P10) to 64x96 in RGBPanels (P4), giving me almost 10x more pixels.
Running lots of demo code at 96x64 in 24bpp, storing 2 framebuffers for page switching, plus bitplanes for PWM, it ended up significantly stressing the amount of fragmented memory available on ESP32, so this talk deals with what I learned and how to get around the limitations.
Then, I also brought a demo of my next version using Raspberry Pi and displaying a framebuffer of 128x192, using FastLED_RPIRGBPanel_GFX I wrote for the occasion :)
Demo of 64x96 with ESP32 and 128x192 on Rasberry Pi
RBGPanels are a pain to drive, they require constant refreshing and it becomes more of a problem when you aim for higher resolutions (128x128 and above), as they require more horsepoewr and memory than either a teensy 3.6 or ESP32 can reasonably provide (the two top of the line chips supported by SmartMatrix)
Another issue is that SmartMatrix, while better than all the other libraries on arduino, doesn't support all kind of weird panels out there, specifically the AB and AC panels that you often end up getting when you get higher resolutions like 128x64.
Using Neopixels would work better of course, but they caan't reasonably be had in less than P5 (0.5cm/LED) while RGBPanels go down to P2. Also, neopixels are about 10X more expensive per pixel, if not more.
So, the solution is to use a rPi to drive RGBPanels of size 128x128 and larger (a single Pi with 3 parallel channels can reasonably run up to 256x256. After that it gets harder and you need multiple microcontrollers).
This is where the excellent https://github.com/hzeller/rpi-rgb-led-matrix driver comes in. It's the most feature complete RGBPanel driver for microcontrollers
Ok, but you have all this arduino code, maybe written for a FastLED::NeoMatrix or Adafruit::NeoMatrix array using the Adafruit::GFX API. Or maybe, you used the FastLED API with an XY mapping function, or maybe even you're using the LEDMatrix API for FastLED. None of those work on rPi, and you don't want to change/rewrite your code.
Well, there is good news: you can use https://github.com/ChrisMicro/ArduinoOnPc to run arduino code on PCs, and therefore also rPi. It is however designed to display in an X11 windows, which is not what you'd want. So, instead, I forked it for you and wrote a rPi glue driver for my FrameBuffer::GFX base class: https://github.com/marcmerlin/ArduinoOnPc-FastLED-GFX-LEDMatrix
You therefore end up getting access to those 3 arduino graphics APIs, and you can render on rPi using a much faster and the more feature complete https://github.com/hzeller/rpi-rgb-led-matrix driver
By using these driver options, I get about 400Hz refresh rate on rPi3, lowering the amount of pwm bits:
~/rpi-rgb-led-matrix/examples-api-use/demo --led-gpio-mapping=regular --led-rows=64 --led-cols=128 --led-row-addr-type=0 --led-chain=1 --led-show-refresh --led-slowdown-gpio=1 --led-parallel=3 --led-pwm-dither-bits=1 --led-pwm-bits=7 --led-panel-type=FM6126A -D0
Those variables are assigned when you create "rgb_matrix::Canvas *canvas", which is fed into matrix->setCanvas(). See this example code:
With rPi, especially with the active-3 board you can drive resolutions of at least 256x256. Here is an example of 128x192, 4 times bigger than the highest resolution I was ever able to drive on ESP32 (64x96). Here is a video natively playing on rPi:
