| Yes, but I mean: WS2812 and its other addressable friends aren't the whole story in LED lighting, and neither is RGB. Maybe my project involves developing automatically-adjustable color temperature indirect lighting for a semi-permanent exhibit space, where the color temperature is based on that of the light cascading in through the glass windows during the day and softening things to a low color temperature at night. That space doesn't ever need to be colorful, but it does need to be bright. And while adjustable CT lighting does exist in the commercially-available form, perhaps there's nothing off-the-shelf that fits this space so I have to DIY parts of it. And maybe doing good stuff with WLED is already a skill that I have, so I want to use WLED. Hardware-wise, I can get there with dense parallel strips of warm and cool white LEDs with a good color rendering index from vendors like BTF. I'll already have a lot of work ahead of me with the design and installation challenges (like managing heat, power distribution, and diffusion). I can reduce the work required by driving it with a pre-fab controller from QuinnLED. And no aspect of this project needs colors other than two shades of white that are carefully mixed together, and none of it needs things to be pixel-addressable. It's not that WS2812 is slow (nothing here needs to be fast); it's that the advantages of WS2812 aren't wanted or useful. Including extra features detracts from the main goal, and isn't KISS. :) So instead, dumb LEDs can make sense. They don't have to be smart. --- Or: Maybe my project wants density, instead. Maybe it involves a carnival attraction, and wants aspects of something like an Atomic 3000 LED from Martin[1]: https://www.martin.com/en-US/products/atomic-3000-led Those are easy-enough to buy, but they're ~$4,000 each and that's way out of my budget. Besides, they talk DMX instead of WLED, and DMX is a very different universe. WS2812 is straight out, just because WS2812 in any form lacks the density required for the intensity desired. So I'll have to come up with something -- maybe I can refit a Chinese "UFO light" that runs on 36 or 48VDC or something internally, if I can find one, so as to reduce it to being just a collection of dumb LEDs. And then, again, I'll need a controller for whatever I come up with. I may just buy a controller for those dumb LEDs from QuinnLED for $40 -- I certainly can't build a box like that for this kind of price. [1]: I was in front of a row of these at a Nine Inch Nails concert several months ago. Their use was very conservative until the very end -- at which point I felt like the intensity of the strobe effects was melting a part of my brain. The flashes were the brightest white imaginable, but the after-images were a bizarre and murky background haze of red and blue that lacked a definite source. 10/10, don't try this at home. |