Has anyone else had this issue? Its hardware related, not fastLED, but I figure this is a good place to ask. ws2812B strips being run on an arduino uno, powered by a LiPo no voltage regulation to the strips, so theyre underpowered 4.1-3.7 v).
Basically one of the pixels in the middle of the strip gets fucked and the pattern only gets sent to the remaining ones in the line occasionally. I can get it to work if I bend the strip and apply pressure to the pixel just the right way (see the video).
This has happened on a few different strips of my wearable. At first it used to just happen at the solder locations, and I’d just have to resolder the data wire, but now its happening in the middle of the strip, where I havent soldered anything. Can this be fixed by resoldering the LED pins or anything?
Manufacturers make LED strips 1/2 meter at a time and then they solder the 1/2 meter strips together. I cannot clearly see the point you are pressing down on. If this is a seam you could fix the seam with a soldering (joining the strips back together. Outside that I would think there is an issue with the copper trace (inside the poly film) or a foreign object is intermittently shorting the connection and pressing down causes the object to move out of the way.
If this is a copper trace issue, I would cut out the offending LED(s) at the cut lines. and solder in a replacement segment – similar to how the manufacturers join LED segments together.
I’ve had a couple of similar issues with pixels on my 2811 strips, initially I suspected the traces were damaged or there was a dry joint somewhere. It turned out that there was a probably a bad connection in the led itself as only pressure to the face of the led would get it to work. I would just cut the bad pixels out and rejoin the strip.
@Michael_Sharnet it’s not a seam unfortunately, which is what makes it particularly strange. I figure it must be the trace because the joints appear fine
It could be the led itself. The are sometimes not re-flowed correctly to the solder pad on the bottom. Take a soldering Iron, some flux and heat it quickly to re-bond all 4 edges, without destroying the cable.
Otherwise, just cut out the part of the strip between breakpoints. and solder the strip together, losing 1-3 leds.
@Ryan_Clough You are wearing these strips, so naturally they are going to twist and bend A LOT, which are things that strips don’t like to do. Reflow the solder, pin by pin, on the LED itself, or just find the DO and DI pins and reflow them. Or as suggested, ditch the bad pixel!
Yeah its fixed now. I almost never run at full brightness because at half brightness it’s already almost too bright to wear on close quarters with other people.
Whatever this issue was it was on the data pins for me so brightness shouldn’t have had an effect
