Is it possible to optimize the use of a blade with SK6812 LED?

I know they work well even with the standard settings but if it is possible to do better why not? :sweat_smile:

SK6812 work exactly like WS2811 AFAIK, so no optimizations are possible.

okay perfect, thanks :grin:

Better like how? What to optimize?

I’ll start by saying that I don’t know how the blade animations are managed and even less about the libraries used to manage the LED strips themselves. Also, when I created the topic I got confused between the SK6812 and the SK6812 RGBW with which obviously you could reproduce more different shades of color.

So, brightness is the only aspect that can still make sense to analyze.

The SK6812 should be brighter, according to the cited article about 800-1000 mcd compared to the 500-700 mcd of the WS2812. Now, if the brightness of the LEDs depends exclusively on an electronic issue, i.e. how many amps it receives, in theory the proffieboard should manage the right current by itself from what I understand. However, if the brightness of the LEDs also depends on the library that is used to control the LEDs then the situation changes because maybe there is a variable, constant, or a range of brightness values ​​that they can assume that differ for the two types of LEDs.
In fact, there would also be the question of a higher scan frequency rate that could be exploited in some way perhaps.

Of course I realize that this is really a small thing, especially without the greater color range that an SK6812 RGBW could offer.

These types of LEDs (WS2811/WS2812/WS2813/SK6812/neopixels/etc.) work very differently from normal LEDs, and for the most part, they manage themselves. ProffieOS only really does two things:

  1. turn the power on (100%, no management)
  2. send RGB or RGBW values (8-bit, 255 levels per channel) to the LEDs which specifies how bright they should be.

There is no way for ProffieOS to know how many mcd will be produced, how many amps will be drawn, or even if the LED is even there or not, as the protocol used to send the bits only goes one way. ProffieOS doesn’t use any “libraries” to control the pixels, it’s all managed by code intrinsic to ProffieOS.

If you use RGB pixels, and you instruct ProffieOS to make the blade white, it will send 255,255,255, which turns the pixel on 100%. If you replace the pixel with a brighter one, exactly the same thing happens, but the pixel will be slightly brighter and draw a little more power.

With RGBW, ProffieOS has two options: RGBW mode or RGBw mode. In RGBW mode, ProffieOS will send 255,255,255,255 for white, activating all four LED channels, and generate the maximum brightness possible, which of course also draws the most power.

In RGBw mode, ProffieOS will send 0,0,0,255 for white, activating only the white part of the LED. This reduces brightness and power draw by about half.

Personally I’m not a big fan of the RGBW pixels. The blades I like the most are red and blue, and having an extra white die doesn’t help with that. in most RGBW LEDs, the white color is produced by taking a blue LED and coating it with a material that converts blue light to white light. Unfortunately, this material can get partially activated by the nearby blue LED, which mixes a little white into your blue colors, making them less deep blue. IMHO, you have to like white blades for RGBW to be an advantage.

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What Fredrik said, and also RGBW strips have less vibrant Red, Green and Blue colors compared to RGB strips. Also I think RGB is brighter than RGBW. There is no way to control them differently, they all have same protocol and frequency. I would only use RGBW blade if my main blade color is White and I still want to have other colors for the effects.

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and to choose one of these two options do I have to specify in the configuration file in BladeConfig blades = {… }, or is it done automatically?

It is specified in the blades array:

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Okay, I get It.

Thank you both for your detailed replies :pray: