Massively Parallel Virtual LED Pins on ESP32

For a future build of we plan to control more than one LED “trail” from the host controllers

74HC595 : this is an 8 bit shift register (you will need one 74HC595 for each Virtual pin)

If you are using RGB led type then this library is fully compatible with fastLED library objects

WS2812,

u/yves-bazin in r/FastLED

SK6812.

RGB:

We have 6 of the Heltec Wireless Stick Lite LoRa ESP boards. These seem to have loaded up a lot of the ESP32 pins, which is one reason I started researching virtual pin multiplexing

ICs needed

WS2813,

WS2815

RGBW

74HC245 : this is a bus used as a level shifter (you will need only one of them for LATCH and CLOCK)

That’s only the time needed to push the bits down the wire.

NeoPixels receive data from a fixed-frequency 800 KHz datastream (except for “V1” Flora pixels, which use 400 KHz).

This library is a new take on driving ws2812 leds with I2S on an esp32. It allows to drive up to 120 strips !!! leds in parallel of

If you want to drive many (i.e. > 8) LED strips in parallel, you will need to multiplex the pins on a “normal” ESP32. This will require some ICs, and a specific extra driver.

FastLED Parallel RGB_LED strips on ESP32