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Comment by basseq | Hacker News Reader

Lots of material out there on on using WS2811/2 LEDS for Christmas lights. A Raspberry Pi is a little overkill; a ESP8266 / NodeMCU running WLED will do you just fine. Reddit's r/led is filled with these projects, or check our DrZzs on YouTube who has a ton of detailed guidance.

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On the other hand, if you were, like me, an early adopter of the Raspberry Pi you probably find your old Pi 1 is too slow to use for demanding applications these days. But doing a bit of bit banging and software or hardware SPI to control a strip of LEDs is well within a Pi 1's capability, and the Pi comes for free if you have one gathering dust.

Agreed, ESP8266/ESP32 is totally sufficient. Maybe if you wanted to run Xlights also off the same board it would make sense? I wouldn't bother. Dr. Zzs is selling a couple of pre-flashed boards that make the whole WLED set-up really easy (1).

1. https://drzzs.com/shop/dig-uno-diy-rgb-led-controller-w-wled...

Doesn't it depend on how many simultaneous strips you want to drive and the no. of leds, for large installations I think an FPGA probably makes more sense?

The signal to drive these LEDs isn't super complex and any simple MCU can bit bang generate it on a digital output. The bigger limitation is usually memory if you're buffering all the color values to animate them, and to a lesser extent raw processing speed to do more and more complex animations and math.

Yeah the ws2811 signal is only around 800kHz or so from what I recall, I was thinking to generate say 8+ simultaneous signals from a framebuffer would be more difficult on an MCU than an FPGA, which can do that trivially. But I think some strips like APA102 can be driven at frequencies in the order of MHz using an SPI type protocol (just saw someone claiming 35MHz on the wire)

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