Changing number of LEDs breaks the app

[Aaryan-Kapoor]

Great project, but slight issue. I have an LED strip with approximately 140 LEDs throughout its length. The app works fine at the hardcoded 57 LEDs but completely breaks when I change it to 140 LEDs. I made the changes specifically in:

In the controller directory:

1. Under devices.py: change led_num to 140 from 57.

In the firmware directory:

1. In lightbar.ino change NUMLED to 140 from 57.
2. In main.py change NUMLED to 140 from 57

I am using a Raspberry Pi Pico
This light strip: https://a.co/d/1lKjcDb

I would appreciate a fix or a guide on how to fix it as this is truly an amazing project!

[Aaryan-Kapoor]

Specifically the application freezes when I change the speed or click on any other button after playing the LED animation

[Aaryan-Kapoor]

Update: Slight improvement, I increased the BUFLEN in lightbar.ino to 2048, and the controller application seems to be more responsive this way. This may hint at a bandwidth or RAM limitation. But even now I can't set the speed over 25/min, it just freezes the app.

[Aaryan-Kapoor]

@Harvey71 Right now, only one LED is ping-ponging back and forth, which requires a high amount of FPS to address each individual LED out of the 140, hence increasing the bandwidth required.

Could we increase the number of LEDs that ping-pong back and forth to 2-3 so that we don't need as much bandwidth? This would reduce the required bandwidth by a lot, making the app way faster.

[Aaryan-Kapoor]

Update: I was able to circumvent the issue by getting another strip with a lower amount of LEDs per meter. However, I strongly believe that the issue is limited bandwidth. So anyone reading this, try getting a more powerful strip controller instead of the pico if you have a high LEDs/m count.