title: FastLED: How can I set an entire strip to one color, without using an array?
body: <p>I'm currently working off an Arduino Uno.  I was having issues with running out of RAM, and I managed to fix them.  Then the person who this project is for let me know that there is another strip of 150 LEDs which are all one color.</p>
  
  <p>This wouldn't be an issue, but the only way to set leds colors in FastLED that I know of is to give an array of colors where each index represents an LED.</p>
  
  <p>In this scenario that's 450bytes of data, which is roughly 25% of an Arduino Unos ram, entirely dedicated to 3 bytes worth of data: one single color.</p>
  
  <p>Now, besides this being an abhorrent waste of resources, it's also something I simply can not afford.</p>
  
  <p><strong>Does anybody know how I can set 150 LEDS to the same color without making an array?</strong></p>
  
  <p><em>What I've tried so far:</em>
  I've tried going through the source code of FastLED, and have found that <code>CFastLED::addLeds</code> creates a <code>CLEDController</code> which later has <code>CLEDController::show()</code> called, which then calls 'showPixels()' which is a virtual function that is deabstracted by each different type of strip protocol class, and always requires an LED[] array.  As far as I can tell, I would have to dive into each different protocol class before I could do this, at which point I might as well delete FastLED and write my own version from scratch.</p>
  
  <p>In my scenario, the bottom of the chain seems to be this:
  <a href="https://github.com/FastLED/FastLED/blob/03d12093a92ee2b64fabb03412aa0c3e4f6384dd/platforms/arm/k20/octows2811_controller.h#L40" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://github.com/FastLED/FastLED/blob/03d12093a92ee2b64fabb03412aa0c3e4f6384dd/platforms/arm/k20/octows2811_controller.h#L40</a></p>
  
  <p>It seems there's really no decent way to set an entire strip of LEDs to the same color in FastLED.</p>