FastLED VS NeoPixelBus

I used the examples from here https://github.com/FastLED/FastLED/wiki/Multiple-Controller-Examples

Sweet. Then pretty much any arduino or other microcontroller would take care of what you need. The strips only take one output pin plus power and ground so just about everything will work for driving them. They act like a long shift register so the single pin is all that's needed to load the full strip with whatever patterns you want regardless of the length. You just have to tell it how many LEDs there are in total is all. Check out the FastLED library. You can learn more about it there and/or install the library in the IDE by pressing "ctrl shift I" for windows or "command shift I" for mac and search for it in the upper search area and install it right there. It comes with working examples too so all you would have to do is install the library, load one of the new example sketches that came with it, and probably edit the example to change the NUM_LEDS count to match what you're working with.

This library (and some others) supports them: https://github.com/Makuna/NeoPixelBus

FastLED doesn't natively support RGBW addressable strips as of version 3.5.0 (October 2022). The alternate library NeoPixelBus does support RGBW strips, but handles animation in a completely different way than FastLED does.This snippet is an example of a way to shuttle data from FastLED RGB to NeoPixelBus RGBW, for folks (like me!) who prefer creating animations with FastLED.The additional library NPBColorLib is needed because NeoPixelBus doesn't (currently) use the white channel when converting RGB to RGBW -- see https://github.com/Makuna/NeoPixelBus/issues/323Tested with:FastLED, version 3.5.0 from https://github.com/FastLED/FastLEDNeoPixelBus, version 2.7.0 from https://github.com/Makuna/NeoPixelBusNPBColorLib, updated 2020-05-29 from https://github.com/jackjansen/NPBColorLib

I know it sounds insane, but it was an example script and I had issues with other example scripts too. Here's the example: https://github.com/Makuna/NeoPixelBus/blob/master/examples/NeoPixelBrightness/NeoPixelBrightness.ino

Do you mean https://github.com/Makuna/NeoPixelBus ?

One of the issues I ran into with LED chains (not the same kind of setup as this) was that some of the data pins on ESP8266 support hardware PWM and some don't. The LED library I used automatically did software PWM / bit-banging on the later pins. This bogged down the processor enough to make the wifi & IR-reception flakey when the number of LEDs was too high. https://github.com/Makuna/NeoPixelBus/wiki/ESP8266-NeoMethods has a bit on that - essentially only GPIO 1,2,3 support non-bit-banging. Depending on the board, you'll have different GPIO pins in different places, and some perhaps not available at all. I don't know how this LED panel is controlled, my guess is that some of the control pins need to be at high resolution, and that using hardware for that as much as possible will reduce the overhead needed, making it all run smoother.

That said, if you need RGBW support right now you could look at NeoPixelBus. It has very few of the capabilities of FastLED though...

Have you also tried Makuna's Neopixelbus for pushing out the RGBW pixels? Same thing with slower framerate?

Double-check that the outputs you chose will work for WLED (all of them will need "bit-banging" to generate the signal, which takes a bit of processing power - GPIO1,2,3 would be able to generate the signal directly). If you have a dev-board, this should be easy to check.