SK9822 support from AllPixelMini

I know that the APA102 and SK9822 are very similar but required small software differences to handle them … and this is already handled by BiblioPixel … but SK9822 is not mentioned anywhere I could see in the AllPixelMini hardward documentation.
I am pretty sure that it does work - but can you confirm (and maybe update the docs for future readers)?

I can confirm that the SK9822 works with the AllPixel. The difference is that the SK9822 and APA102 technically have a brightness byte that can set, which the AllPixel has never supported. This is mainly because the library we use (FastLED) doesn’t support it. And the only difference really between the SK and APA strips is that how they handle that brightness value is different. But since it’s not supported anyways… doesn’t really matter :slight_smile:

Thanks for the reply.
I’ll place order for AllPixelMini later today.

I just had a quick look at the FastLED code and it looks like support for brightness was added around a year ago.

Sorry, should’ve clarified. It supports it now… but not in a way that was really usable to us. Mainly because we’d have to update to a newer version of FastLED which has a larger memory footprint. This may not seem like such a big deal, but we are already using FastLED in an unintended way… that is that we selectively load the driver for your particular LED type at runtime instead of compile time. This causes higher memory usage already and even more so on the newer versions of FastLED. This is a problem because we need 2100 bytes of RAM on a device with only 2560 bytes to support the specified 700 pixels. Pretty much, FastLED takes up another 350ish bytes and the rest is all the other logic and serial buffer (64 bytes alone). It’s very memory optimized to support as many pixels as possible. So using newer FastLED would require loosing max pixel count.
If we ever do new firmware to add features it will be for a completely new revision of the board - one in which we will probably remove support for older LED types that aren’t used anymore.