Re: addressable led driver

so i did read the chatgpt driver

looks like drivers i read (where this info probably came from, including spkr i didn't look yet), character device for data, ioctl for config, bitbanging and sleep that i don't really get (binary math and cpus are hard)

that aside

soc is h3, i don't know how well it keeps timings. it's ability to keep actual wall clock time without is bs. or is it it's rtc

i have a beaglebone with really old fbsd and it's prus i have never tried. new beaglebone doesn't yet work iirc

there's always option to go dedicated uc way and use (usb) uarts or usb direct

but what are realistic results i could get from direct control? i'm aware that somehow spi and dma could help

there's only few spis on h3. actually how do they even work? under fbsd

i mean i could run out of real hw spis but those signals don't travel that far anyway so maybe it's enough. my idea is not driving screen amount of leds right now

if cpu speed changing would make it bad, could i lock it? would that cause too much heat?

if cpu needs to be unused, maybe i could run it without encryption on network side if it helps. even if only during times i drive the leds. for networking i plan to use soc internal eth

i'm not really fully getting it all. all i know is, this is not a realtime system. it has multiple cpu cores, etc. also does other tasks

but if i go full gpio software control. how much could i dri ve? in which config? would the longer data stream per one gpio be worse or better than many concurrent streams?

i mean i once wrote ws2801 driver in perl with libgpio that ran on bbb. iirc kind of worked

similar to old

https://freebsdfoundation.org/our-work/events/blog/blog-post/building-a-physical-freebsd-build-status-dashboard/

but those things are so tolerant you could even finger-bitbang it

but here i don't know. actually i read that ws2812 is somewhat tolerant too, factory datasheet is just for ref

but i don't know. maybe someone else wants to play. get apa106 leds, shove on random io, even 3.3v vcc iirc worked. especially this time of year

the non-entertainment use case would be maybe multicolor status leds. which people with colorblindness consider as devil's work, i heard

but yeah. i'm interested in it

main type of leds i will see myself using is long cable where at each 20cm you have milky epoxy blob with led in it. they look very much like regular christmas lights and you could get them lately at 100€ per 1000 leds roll

so i was thinking how well fbsd could direct drive them as it would be nice it i could do this without external hw

the other options i'm aware (all that arduino, fastled, wled, etc) but i was curious about this method as i love fbsd :p