I’ve spent a lot of time on this and hopefully can get an answer here from anyone who has written code for these addressable RGB chips. I have a PIC microcontroller running these and in the datasheet they show a global brightness 5 bit value of 0 to 31, preceded by a string of 111. MSB to LSB. So…in byte form, 224 would be OFF (and that works fine) and 1 - 31 would be values 225 to 255.
My question is this –
I see very (extremely) little difference in brightness of the led whether it’s at a low or high value. Right now, I have just the red led operating at 225 (1 !) and it’s only a hint less bright than 255. (31) – can anyone fill me in on this? thanks.
Global brightnes in APA102 is deemed useless (and coarse).
WLED does not use it (at least not directly). Try asking Makuno on NeoPixelBus Github pages, as he is the author of LED driver that WLED uses.
Ok. Big thanks. This was driving me crazy as like I say even ONE (225) is way too bright for what I want. I guess the only option is some sort of filter or something. Any ideas appreciated. Thanks kindly for your help. Wonder why global brightness is available as an option when it simply doesn’t even work?
I don’t know why I didn’t think in terms of reducing the value of the RGB but that seems to make a pretty good difference. It was planted in my mind that changing the RGB value is really about color mixing rather than brightness level. So I’ve reduced the red from 255 to 50 and it looks a lot more subdued.