Fastled: New Chip Type: NS108 / HD108

[ccoenen]

Hi everyone, Newstar is producing a new chip with the same footprint as the APA102C/HD107/HD107s. The special thing about it is: it can do 16 bit per channel! It is also superior to the (already pretty great) APA102C in two other ways: it has 27KHz PWM and it undestands 3.0V as logic level "HIGH", so you could drive it at 5V and have 3.3V logic voltage without any tricks.

16bit is probably a major change to FastLED, but I think it would be amazing to support this chip.

A datasheet can be obtained here:
http://www.addressableledstrip.com/Datasheet-26.html (look for NS108/HD108)

The protocol is very straightforward and looks very much like the APA102-style protocols with the only change being the amount of bits sent:

• overall: 128bits 0 are the start frame
• 64 bits per LED:
  
  
  
  • 1 bit 1
  
  
  • 15 bits gain adjustment (5 bit per channel, table in the datasheet)
  
  
  • 16 bits green
  
  
  • 16 bits red
  
  
  • 16 bits blue
  
  
• overall: 1bit 1 per led to end the frame (i.e.: 300 leds connected? send 300 bits)

[ccoenen]

As a quick and dirty first step, one could implement the protocol but left-shift the 8 bit data and just ignore or duplicate the least significant 8 bits. But eventual full 16 bit support would be amazing.

[marmilicious]

Adding support for pixels with a higher number of bits per channel (and also support for RGBW) is definitely a future goal for FastLED. And as you correctly guessed these changes will require a huge code update/rewrite due to how FastLED was originally optimized.

Thank you for pointing out this new chip though and providing the details and datasheet link. It does sound great!

[sylvieuherkov]

Hmm, their HD109 16bit RGBW is coming soon also http://www.addressableledstrip.com/CompanyNews-9/25.html

I loved their 2020 series also, but there is 4k MOQ, I really hope someone will add it to product line and distribute it in small quantity, it has great improvement comparing to APA102 2020

[machinaut]

I just brought up a strip with these, and basically found the same. In case its useful, here's another "brand" of the same LEDs, but the datasheet is worse/wrong in a bunch of places, which made bringup fun. https://www.rose-lighting.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/53/2019/11/HD108-led.pdf

[marmilicious]

Thank you @machinaut
I'm going to link back to your reddit post about these too incase that's useful to anyone.
https://www.reddit.com/r/FastLED/comments/jq646t/debugging_new_16bit_strands_hd108_rgb_leds/

[machinaut]

@braydenm was able to get it in Adafruit_DotStar here as an example of integration (though it's pretty apparent how to update 8bit->16bit). https://github.com/braydenm/ledstrip