I’ve been using my current LED strips for my persistence of vision project. The strips are made with the WS2801 LED driver and have always worked for me … till now that is. With the speed at which I’m updating them, they just couldn’t handle the data.
That is what the string would produce when I’m sending data at a fairly fast pace, somewhere in the <500 micro seconds per column. That’s 500 microseconds (or less) for the string to switch between one column to the next. The strings simply can’t keep up. If I slow it down, it works just fine:
So I think I’m going to order some strips that have a faster driver on them, like the LPD8806 and do some testing with those.