Synchronize two SmartLED shields' refreshes?

1

In playing with my large panel it’s pretty clear that going any larger with anything animated would likely not animate smoothly enough to be useful if it even worked at all. In fact, I wouldn’t mind it if my current setup was a bit faster (even after overclocking), so I got to thinking…is there any straightforward way to synchronize the refreshes of two identical teensys (teensi?)with identical sd card contents? Perhaps some sort of hardware interrupt driven GIF decode start? Anyone have any ideas on how to go about this?

If it could be accomplished, you could likely have each smartLED shield only refreshing half of the display’s pixels and in my case I’d probably also be able to get some color refresh back.

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Good idea. I’m not aware of anyone having done this before. Few thoughts:

  • You could have one Teensy acting as master and keeping track of time, and sending a message to the other with the GIF to play, and a time sync
  • This library could help with transferring the messages
  • you could use serial to send a command - e.g. “play asdf.gif”, and use a separate GPIO line to synchronize the start, as it would be faster to detect a change on a GPIO line than to receive and parse a serial message