ESP32 frame buffer for HUB75 LED display??

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gkuchera
 
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ESP32 frame buffer for HUB75 LED display??

Post by gkuchera »

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I would like to build a backpack sort of board for the HUB75 (Large LED panels) to offload the processing/loop updates from a PI so the PI can be collectin data, and rendering the displays, and I'm wondering if an ESP32 would have enough power to achieve 12-14 bit PWM color? The thought was to use SPI or l2c to drive the framebuffer. I have not worked with an ESP32 as of yet, but I'm curious if you think they would have the processing power to accomplish the update loops required to make HUB75 work?

I have been working on the driver for a raspberry, but even with a reatime kernel you still see glitches on the display when other things occur on the PI. I have implemented a shared memory reatime driver for the display on a PI/Basically I split out the driver that was supplied by Adafruit's suggestion tuned it up and bit and added some realtime loops which works pretty well as long as the PI does little else. The driver loop pulls about 50% of the CPU on a PI2b, 32% of a PI3b. (single core). So I'm toying with either going the FPGA route or something like a ESP32 board. FPGA looks like a much larger learning curve so i'm leaning toward the ESP32.. Or if you have a suggestion of a better Ardunio like realtime processor with the kick to do this?

Thoughts?

-Geoff

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