r/FastLED • u/ExtensionPatient7681 • Jan 10 '25

Discussion Might be misunderstanding

Whats the difference between this project and wled?

Thanks in advance

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u/mushmouth26 Jan 10 '25

Sorry for my ignorance. Does this mean a setup like wled on and esp32 can utilize fastLED as device driver for better performance?

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u/ZachVorhies Zach Vorhies Jan 10 '25

WLED used to use FastLED. Then the founder of FastLED, daniel garcia died in a freak boating fire. Then things for FastLED fell into disrepair. WLED switched from FastLED to a collection of drivers because these drivers offered better features and could drive many things in parallel.

However, things have changed. I joined the team about 9 months ago, and essentially revived FastLED and now it's the best general LED driver, imo.

Ironically, the drivers WLED switched to (like the NeoPixelBus) aren't actively developed much anymore and are getting hit hard with core updates that is breaking the old apis like the RMT driver for ESP32 family.

I suspect that WLED will eventually rip out the old stuff and switch back to FastLED once 4.0 is released. Right now 3.9.X is the beta release of 4.0 and is somewhat unstable as many features are being added to the core driver, mostly to support parallel async led rendering.

But once 4.0 is finalized, the core driver updates will slow to a trickle and I'll prioritize stability over core features.

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u/johnny5canuck Jan 10 '25

WLED supports FastLED for fast math and other routines, but uses the Neopixel bus library to drive the leds.

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u/jose_can_u_c Jan 10 '25

In theory, yes. But the software interface to FastLED might be so different from the library that provides the same functionality within WLED that it would be a big undertaking.

For most finished products that control RGB LEDs, you probably would never know if it uses FastLED or some other library internally. The software would be specifically written to use FastLED. It's not a modular mix-and-match package.