I just found these cute little boards on adafruit:
These little guys use I2C, and can drive neopixels, buttons, analog inputs, small LEDs and other stuff. I’m thinking that they might be pretty useful for projects where the number of pins on a Proffieboard just isn’t enough. For instance, if you want a prop with 20 buttons or something.
Adding support for it wouldn’t be particularly hard, but I’m not sure it’s something anybody needs, so I thought I’d ask around and see if anybody has been doing projects where the number of pads on the board have been a limiting factor.
I think one of the big draws of extra pins on a proffieboard, at least that I’ve heard the most, would be to be able to do more dumb LEDs, given it’s a fairly common (and practically-based, as I’ve seen installs where it is a real limitation) criticism of Proffie relative to CFX, CFX having its “accent sequencer”
Unfortunately Seasaw isn’t great at driving LEDs. It only has 5 PWM channels, and they are only 8-bit which makes dim colors impossible or flickery.
How often does this limit really come up though? I mean, neopixels are almost everywhere nowadays (KR now puts 6 neopixels in their PixelSwitch buttons.), they give you full RGB and they require fewer wires.
I think there’s a novelty to the form factor you can get those types of LEDs (or any light source) in. I’ve seen edison filaments, those soviet-era LEDs slothfurnace used to sell, etc, they just allow for more unique aesthetics, whereas neopixels are boring in comparison. If you can package them up (like in your KR pixel switch example), they’re certainly great, no doubt, but I think there’s certainly valid, and rather neat, use cases for dumb LEDs.
I’ve installed a rather small number of hilts and they haven’t been anywhere close to pushing the envelope, so I’m more speaking to the things I’ve seen where CFX has been used because proffie simply couldn’t be.
I suppose I could add support for this thing:
It has 16 12-bit PWM output channels.
It’s not exactly small though.
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Possibly the best way to drive more LEDs would be to use external WS2811 chips. In particular, there is a 10-segment PLI display that is still fairly popular, and doesn’t have a neopixel equivalent as far as I know.
It would be fairly simple to build a PCB that fits on the back of the PLI and uses 3 WS2811 chips to drive the 10 LEDs. It would require a small amount of support in ProffieOS since the color order would be RRR rather than RGB or BGR, but that seems fairly easy to implement.
Not sure how popular those PLI displays are though.
If I made the PCB, would anybody be interested?
I think just generally support for such sequencing using WS2811s would be interesting…
Being able to set arbitrary colors for each one so they’re properly driven (or could just do White like how single dumb LEDs tend to be done, I prefer using just White since it makes things simpler…), really just the ability to easily break them out as each an individual LED instead of a channel of color.
So you could do something like (I’m spitballing)
BladeConfig blades = {
WS281XSequence<White, blade4Pin>(),
WS281XSequence<White, nullptr>(),
WX281XSequence<White, nullptr>()
};
Similar syntax to subblade…
This also ties into mixing RGB and RGBW pixels on the same string, which is a feature people have wanted for a while now.
I’m not sure what the best way to do all of this is, but ultimately I’ll probably just do the simplest, whatever that is. 
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