Teensy LED Wiring
The teensy boards can be wired to leds on their own, but since they are 3.3v devices, the signal often is not strong enough to make it to the leds, leading to flickering, or nothing at all. You can buy an adapter board that the teensy's can plug directly into, made specifically for driving 8 outputs of leds in parallel.
Due to the nature of the Teensy's hardware, certain pins are connected to DMA hardware accelerated buffers, and since these pins are very specific the octo adapter already connects everything needed and outputs the right pins to the ethernet output.
For more info on how this all works, click here.
If you're purchasing the teensy 3.2, be sure to get the right headers, and pins so that you can make your teensy removable later on down the line. this isn't necessary, but if you end up needing to replace a broken one this makes it a lot easier and cheaper.
Complete info on how to wire the Teensy + octo adapter to leds can be found here.
The 3.6 is MUCH faster, and also sports an sd card reader. Due to it's increased speed, it may be possible to use more teensys on a single usb circuit while maintaining 60 fps than the 3.2 counterpart, but this has not been verified yet. Future releases of the PxlNode teensy code base will feature functionality using the sd card reader, so stay tuned for that.
The teensy 3.6 is longer than the 3.2, so it actually does not fit on the octo adapter board normally. However since the pins are backwards compatible, you can make it work by ordering taller header pins so that the teensy sticks up over the adapter board. All of these items can be ordered at PJRC.com
All variants of the Teensy drive the pixels from the same pins, however there are different pins on different Teensys that must not be used. For convenience, here is the pin assignments if you are not using the Octows2811 adapter shield pictured above:
| Teensy 3.1 / 3.2 Pin | Teensy 3.5 / 3.6 Pin | Function | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2 | 2 | Strip #1 | |
| 14 | 14 | Strip #2 | |
| 7 | 7 | Strip #3 | |
| 8 | 8 | Strip #4 | |
| 6 | 6 | Strip #5 | |
| 20 | 20 | Strip #6 | |
| 21 | 21 | Strip #7 | |
| 5 | 5 | Strip #8 | |
| 32 | - | Do Not Use | |
| 25 | 29,30 | Do Not Use as PWM |
For more info, please refer to this PJRC page on the OCTOWS2811 library.