LEDscape | Beagle Bone Black cape and firmware

LEDscape is a C library typically used in Internet of Things (IoT), Arduino applications. LEDscape has no bugs, it has no vulnerabilities and it has low support. You can download it from GitHub.

The WS281x LED chips are built like shift registers and make for very easy LED strip construction. The signals are duty-cycle modulated, with a 0 measuring 250 ns long and a 1 being 600 ns long, and 1250 ns between bits. Since this doesn’t map to normal SPI hardware and requires an 800 KHz bit clock, it is typically handled with a dedicated microcontroller or DMA hardware on something like the Teensy 3. However, the TI AM335x ARM Cortex-A8 in the BeagleBone Black has two programmable "microcontrollers" built into the CPU that can handle realtime tasks and also access the ARM’s memory. This allows things that might have been delegated to external devices to be handled without any additional hardware, and without the overhead of clocking data out the USB port.