Developer Zachary Vorhies has launched version 3.10.0 of his FastLED library — marking, he says, a shift to a more artist-focused roadmap.
“3.10 represents a new phase of FastLED,” Vorhies explains. “While the 3.9.XX series focused on improving the driver and increasing the number of LEDs that can be painted at once, the 3.10.XX series will focus more on helping artists and sketch programmers realize their visions. The core driver will still be improved but it’s no longer the primary focus. The tech-artist is.”
FastLED is, as the name implies, a library for high-performance control of multiple LEDs, compatible with a range of target devices including various Arduino development boards, Espressif ESP32 microcontrollers, Teensy boards, and even the Raspberry Pi range of single-board computers. Its latest release brings a range of improvements, not least of which is the porting of Stefan Petrick’s AnimARTrix visualizer — brought across from an implementation for the rival WLED library.
“Keep in mind that AnimARTrix computes in floating point,” Vorhies notes, “so you’ll need either a Teensy 4.X or [an] ESP32-S3 to run at the higher resolutions. Natively it looks best in 16×16 or 32×32 displays. For larger displays you can use fl/upscale.h which will apply bilinear expansion for arbitrary large displays. AnimARTrix is free for non commercial use. It is NOT compiled in by default, instead everything is in a header *.hpp file. When you include it you will get a message letting you know it is GPL code.”
The new release also includes a full port of the AnimARTix visualization tool. (📷: Zachary Vorhies/Stefan Petrick)
Other improvements in the new version include official support for Espressif’s powerful ESP32-P4 platform, an improved I2S driver for the ESP32-S3, and streamlined documentation. Future releases, meanwhile, will show Vorhies’ renewed focus on making the library accessible to artists, rather than developers.
More information is available in Vorhies’ Reddit post, while the new release is available on GitHub under the permissive MIT license.