Ground Zero: Blades: WS281X

A now-common blade type which has a lot of capability… and complexity!

Click the “+” on the bottom left of the “Blade Arrays” page (after adding and selecting a blade array) to add a new blade. You can click the dropdown that appears at the top to switch to “WS281X.”

Primary Configuration

The left section holds the “standard” options for a WS281X blade (an “ARGB” LED strip blade).

Number of Pixels

144 is the number of LEDs in an untrimmed typical 144/m strip. Usually your blade won’t have more LEDs than this (though it might!), but it will probably have less. In order for effects to display at the tip of the blade (such as stab, drag, and melt), you should make sure this value matches the actual number in your blade.

You can leave the value as 144 for now (unless you already know what the value should be), and use the LengthFinder<>) blade style (a little more info here) later once you’re up and running.

Data Pin

Sometimes labeled “DIN” on PCBs, this is the pin your strip is connected to which feeds the color data. Usually this’ll be “Data 1,” “Data 2,” “Data 3” etc. on the Proffieboard, which corresponds to bladePin, blade2Pin, etc. pin names. Sometimes you may want to use a “Free” pin, if you run out of data pins, which you can see the mappings for in the table on the proffieboard website.

LEDs Have White Channel

If your strip is an RGBW type (4-channel), then you’ll want to check this, and maybe need to change the Color Order also.

Power Pins

These types of blades draw a fair amount of power even when they’re displaying black/”off.” For this reason, the negative power line from a WS281X strip is nearly always connected to MOSFETs/LED pads on the Proffieboard to reduce unnecessary battery drain.

For a “main blade” usually two LED pads are bridged together, often LED2 and LED3 (bladePowerPin2 and bladePowerPin3).

As an advanced usage, you might want to use the entry at the bottom of the list and the “+” icon to add custom pins. This would be useful if, for example, you wired an external MOSFET to a “Free” pad.

SubBlades

Here we have the main power-feature of WS281X blades: the ability to split up one strip/data string into many, and/or virtually rearrange the location of the LEDs.

You can modify SubBlades with “Add”/”Remove” under the “SubBlades” section on the right.

To aid with seeing how SubBlades divide up the main/real strip space, the “Split Visualizer” is shown in the middle of the screen. You can click on each split/SubBlade to select it, and it shows “segments” for Stride and ZigZag style SubBlades. You should make sure there’s no blank space once you’re done.

There’s a description of each SubBlade type if you hover over the “Type” selection box, and there’s more info on each type here (see the links to other types at the bottom of the page).

Brightness

In the middle, you’ll notice you can also choose to dim the brightness of the blade as a whole, or there’s another setting to change it just for each SubBlade (on the bottom right, with a SubBlade selected). Tangentially, the “Dynamic Blade Dimming” feature may be interesting to you.

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