Can FastLED be made faster?

Question

I am using FastLED to drive 16 pixels on an addressable WS2812B RGB LED strip. My application has extremely tight timing constraints. Specifically, I need to turn the LEDs on and off within less than 1 ms. I tried FastLED but it requires a minimum of 2.5 ms to execute the Show command, regardless of the number of LEDs attached. I analyzed another library and that one has the exact same limitation. In fact, I found a snippet of code that said roughly: "if this operation performs in less than 2500 us, then wait idly until the 2500 us have passed. Apparently this wait is necessary due to timing requirements of WS2812x strips. Does anyone have any advise about other addressable RGB LED strips or libraries that can be turned on and off within 1 ms?

Answer 1

By default the fastLed is limiting the refresh rate to 400 fps (i.e. 2.5ms).

You can disable that with FastLED.setMaxRefreshRate(0);