It's more efficient passing one register-sized structure than 4
arguments or 4 pointers; working on intermediate values of 'int' size
is also more efficient in code size!
On raspberry pi pico w, this increased free flash space by +104 bytes.
It also increased the speed of my testing animation very slightly, from
187fps to 189fps when run 'unthrottled'
.. a fast helper for animations. It is similar to and inspired by the
PixelMap helper in Adafruit LED Animation library, but with an extremely
fast 'paste' method for setting a series of pixels. This is a common
operation for many animations, and can give a substantial speed improvement.
It's named `adafruit_pixelmap` so that we can package a compatible version
in pure Python for systems that can't fit it in C in flash, or for
Blinka.
This is a proof of concept and can make a very fast comet animation:
```python
import time
import adafruit_pixelbuf
import adafruti_pixelmap
import board
import neopixel
from supervisor import ticks_ms
from adafruit_led_animation.animation.solid import Solid
from adafruit_led_animation import color
pixel_pin = board.GP0
pixel_num = 96
pixels = neopixel.NeoPixel(pixel_pin, pixel_num, brightness=1, auto_write=False, pixel_order="RGB")
evens = adafruit_pixelmap.PixelMap(pixels, tuple(range(0, pixel_num, 2)))
odd_indices = tuple((i, i+2) for i in range(1, pixel_num, 4))
print(odd_indices)
odds = adafruit_pixelbuf.PixelMap(pixels, odd_indices)
assert len(odds) == len(odd_indices)
comet_length = 16
comet1 = [color.calculate_intensity(color.GREEN, ((1+i) / comet_length) ** 2.4)
for i in range(comet_length)]
comet2 = [color.calculate_intensity(color.PURPLE, ((1+i) / comet_length) ** 2.4)
for i in range(comet_length)]
pos1 = 0
pos2 = 96//4
while True:
evens.paste(comet1, pos1, wrap=True, reverse=False, others=0)
pos1 = (pos1 + 1) % len(evens)
odds.paste(comet2, pos2, wrap=True, reverse=True, others=0)
pos2 = (pos2 - 1) % len(odds)
pixels.show()
m = ticks_ms()
if m % 2000 > 1000:
time.sleep(.02)
```
Dan Halbert
foamyguy
Jeff Epler
George Waters
Kattni Rembor