Here's what I was talking about earlier.

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Here’s what I was talking about earlier.

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Ok, I’ve replaced all the wiring with 14 set and now I get a single flicker of a few pixels, then nothing. I see the data on the input pin of the first pixel, but it doesn’t look like the data is being passed to the next one in the chain.

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Well, it appears the ancient myths and legends are true! NeoPixels do not play nicely with heat! I replaced the first pixel in the chain this morning and I have lights again! Although, the flickering is still going on. With all 14awg wire and running the FastLED Palette animations I get a max current of around half an amp and and a max voltage drop in the 2.9V range. Given my limited electronics knowledge, it seems I now have 2 options:

  1. Wire up some type of boost converter for the 5V going to the NeoPixels - There isn’t any space for this in the enclosure, so I’d have to use something small enough to place in the cable to the display because this needs to be portable.

  2. Purchase a higher-voltage power supply and step everything down to the voltages I need. This seems the most practical option since I should just be able to put a 10 Amp 5V regulator between the power switch and the feeds to my boost converter for the electronics and the NeoPixels.

Thoughts?

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have you ever checked the signal system?

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Can you elaborate please?

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If you’re meaning the LED data, it appears to look ok. Like I said, the flickering only happens when the brightness is over 75% and over half the LEDs are on

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Update: I’m using a power MOSFET to switch the high current. With the MOSFET in the circuit, the LEDs set to white, and a dim setting, my voltmeter showed around 3V and I got around .5 Amps. Turning up the brightness to full the volts dropped to 2.5 and I barely hit 1 Amp.

I then shorted the Source and Drain of the MOSFET and tried the experiment again. This time at a dim setting I had 4.5 Volts at the cable and over an Amp. At full brightness I got a drop to about 3.5 volts and used almost 4 Amps.

In both cases, the voltage at the gate on the MOSFET was 5v from the controller

I got the MOSFET from Adafruit and was under the impression I could push it into saturation at 5 volts. I’ll review the datasheet and see if I need a different MOSFET.

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It turns out my MOSFET was correct, I just had it on the 5V line instead of GND.

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A few hours work and things are looking MUCH better! I can even take the heatsink off the MOSFET. Thanks for everyone’s suggestions!