Hi Chris!
I’ve been building an 8×4 matrix made of glowing balls, and each ball has 10 leds inside.
I wanted every ball to behave like a single pixel in WLED so I could use all the built-in 2D effects, but that turned out trickier than I thought…
I tried a few things first:
Duplicating pixels in ledmap.json (doesn’t work)
Using grouping, but that grouped everything both horizontally and vertically, which messed up the 2D layout.
Splitting into segments, but that breaks matrix effects completely.
In the end, the trick was super simple:
Set grouping = 10, so each ball’s 10 leds act as one logical pixel.
Then I made 4 separate matrices, each 80×1, with a Y offset of 10 leds between them.
Now WLED’s 2D effects see the setup as one proper 8×4 matrix, and every ball lights up perfectly as a single pixel without firmware mods or external mapping needed.
I know it’s been some time since you posted, but hopefully this helps you (and maybe others later on!).
Happy lighting!