New to moteino's and looking to drive ws28xx pixels wirelessly. I would love to setup a moteino receiving r/g/b data from another moteino, base station of sorts.that sender would be getting it's data over wired serial over usb coming from a pc.
My question is - would transmitting that much data wirelessly be practical? scalable?
What kind of data rates can be expected on average just sending plain ascii?
what about one moteino to 5, or 10?
Thanks!
Well, it depends...
How many pixels in a chain, one or 100?
How many Moteinos have unique data?
If all the Moteinos are getting the same data then the time for 250 Moteinos isn't any more than the time for one, you can do a broadcast to all the same data in one transmission. If you have a 100 Moteinos all receiving DIFFERENT data, then you may have to do some clever stuff...
The limiting factor is that the RFM69 library only supports 64 byte packets. Now it doesn't take long to transmit a 64 byte packet, but you'd have to do multiple packets if you need to send more than 64 bytes for a full update.
So, like I said, it depends...
The other thing to factor in is that writing WS28xx pixels have VERY critical timing constraints and you can not have anything else going on - like receiving new packets, etc... So, if your model is:
1. Receive packet.
2. Display the packet.
3. repeat at 1
Then no problem. If your protocol is to update pixels while randomly receiving packets, sorry, it ain't gonna happen.
Tom