Having trouble with some WS2811 strips and fastled,

Archive FastLED Archive
,
1

Having trouble with some WS2811 strips and fastled, can’t for the life of me figure out what is causing this:

Using fastled after 69 leds (so 70) my WS2811 strips stop working. The entire strip will not update untill I sever the data pin or shut down the teensy, after which they will update to the (seemingly) last frame.

Using the Neopixel library with strips setup as WS2811 at 800KHZ they actuallly do work for the full amount of 100 leds (5M).

I have 2 different type of strips to work with:

a few with a microcontroller that says: WS2811s
And a lot with a microcontroller that says: WS2811 (These wont work after 69)

Set-up info:
Teensy 3.2 with octoboard adapter
WS2811 strips (not working properly with fastled)
WS2811s strips (working)
Tried basic demoreel example and blink example, both work untill 69 leds.

I have tried the following things:
Neopixel library at 800 KHZ, the strip works
WS2811 at 400 KHZ (Doesnt work entirely, not with neopixel and not with fastled)
WS2811 at regular settings (800KHZ) still wont work.
3 different strips of the same type: WS2811, all show the same problem
Checked whether the teensy is still looping; every x seconds a serial check is printed and shown. (Strip doesnt work regardless)

2

Update: I have tried the same programs on an arduino nano, the program now fully works.

I have also tried the strips with the octows2811 library this also works.

So the problem seems to be a bug between the teensy/octoboard - WS2811 strip and fastled.

3

What version of arduino/teensyduino are you using? Also what clock speed do you have the teensy configured at? I wonder if there’s been some drift in the code generation over time, so that timings have drifted a bit. (Also, for laughs, try using WS2812/WS2812B to see if those timings work better for you)

4

Arduino: 1.8.4
TeensyDuino: 1.4
FastLed: 3.001.006

Setting as WS2812(b) makes no difference.

We just found out that changing the clock speed makes a difference. We normally run at 96MHZ at which it doesn’t work. If we set this to 24MHZ everything works. Any higher and it stops working.

At both clock rates we can see signals being generated with an oscilloscope, despite the strip not working on one rate

Update:
When using Atmel studio and setting the compiler to debug at 96mhz the program runs (although the animations will be choppy). Setting the compiler to release it will not run.