LED Strip Editor

Design LED strip lighting the way you would draw a picture — set the colour, brightness and lit position of every LED, add effects, and see the whole panel before it reaches the hardware.

The idea

A strip of LEDs is a display. It is a long, thin, awkward one, wired in an order somebody chose for the convenience of the solder joints, but a display all the same — and the natural way to design for a display is to draw on it.

So that is what this editor gives you. Pick a colour, click a pixel, and that LED lights. Drag out a shape, and it becomes a piece you can name, reuse and animate. The wiring order, the colour depth and the byte order your particular part demands are described once, in one dialog, and the editor takes care of translating your artwork into them.

What it produces

Most image editors end at a file you look at. This one ends at source code: each region you mark becomes a const array of pixel values, in the order the LEDs are wired and at the colour depth the part can hold. Your firmware includes that file and lights the panel from it.

That is the whole reason the editor is deliberately small. It draws pixels, and it knows about LED hardware. It does not retouch photographs.

Four words worth learning first

Term	What it means here
Box	A rectangle on the image, with a name. One box becomes one exported array — usually one character of a font.
Box list	Every box in the current image, in the order they will be exported. Saved next to the PNG as a `.box` file.
Arrangement	The order the LEDs of a box are walked: which corner is first, rows or columns, and whether alternate lines fold back.
Channel order	The order the colour bytes go out on the wire — `RGB`, `GRB` and so on. Wrong order means the panel lights in the wrong hue.

What a session looks like

Open or create a PNG.
Draw, or paste artwork someone else drew.
Mark the parts you want as boxes and name them.
Set the bit depth, channel order and wiring in LED settings.
Preview it with box animation, then export the source and download it to the board.

💡 Steps 4 and 5 are the ones that describe your hardware. Set them once for a bench and they stay set — they are stored, not asked for at each export.

Frequently asked questions

The panel lights in the wrong colours

Almost always the channel order. Check Build > LED Settings > RGB against what your part expects — WS2812 and SK6812 are GRB, WS2811 is usually RGB.

If the hue is right but everything is too dark or banded, it is the bit depth instead.

The panel lights the wrong pixels

The arrangement. Compare the eight diagrams against how your strip is physically routed, and remember the two modifiers: Zigzag for a strip folded back and forth, Reverse for one clocked from its far end.

The export refused to run at 8 bits

Some colour in the artwork is not in the palette. The export refuses as a whole rather than writing pixels that are quietly wrong. Use Colour conversion to bring the stray colours onto palette entries, then export again.

My boxes disappeared

The box list lives in a .box file beside the PNG. If the PNG was copied without it, the boxes are not lost — they are in the folder you copied from. See Saving.

Auto Size swallowed a region I had deleted

It should not any more: a fully transparent pixel counts as background. If it still happens, the region is filled with a colour rather than cut — fill it with the background colour, or cut it again.

Animation stops early

End is limited by how many boxes are loaded. If the list holds 50 boxes, playback ends at 50 whatever you typed. See Box animation.

The download does not connect

See Download to the device — port, baud rate, and whether another program is holding the port.

Something else

Menu text in the wrong language, a dialog that will not open, an export that throws: these are worth reporting. The application writes unhandled errors to a log you can attach.