CPU Usage when using this connector is very high

[shortbloke]

Environment

• Raspberry Pi 3
• WS2812b 144 1m LED Strip

Issue

1. Connect a couple of sessions to the RPi. In one start top or htop to monitor resource usage.
2. Run the connector sudo env DEBUG='meshblu-connector-ws2811*' npm start
3. Once "Connected" CPU usage of meshblu-connector-runner is ~10-12%
4. If you use Octoblu to send a change of the light to the strip, CPU usage of the process increases to: 30-40%, even for a solid colour. Or even when you send the command to turn them off.

Comparison

This connector is based on usage of rpi-ws281x-native node module. However this module doesn't look to have the same CPU issues. For example running the examples from ~/meshblu-connector-ws2811/node_modules/rpi-ws281x-native/examples Shows:

• CPU usage of ~6% whilst running: sudo node rainbow.js 144
• CPU usage of ~2% whilst running sudo node iterate.js 144
• CPU usage of ~5% whilst running sudo node brightness.js 144

[jamesbulpin]

The WS281x part of the connector is fairly CPU hungry - because it includes animations in its arsenal it runs a frequent rendering loop. A possible improvement would be to suppress running this rendering loop when simple colours (not animations) are selected - pull-requests welcome :)

So it's working as expected