Hey everyone,
I am hoping someone can help me out with an issue that I am experiencing. I am using the Adafruit Huzzah ESP8266 board and 260 WS2812 LEDs with a 20A power supply.
The issue I am having is that the LEDs seem to struggle doing animations and just seem like there isn’t enough processing power to run them but that would be odd with the ESP8266 and 260 LEDs. I also have to have “#define FASTLED_ALLOW_INTERRUPTS 0” added or only the first 3 LEDs will do anything.
So for testing I decided to switch to some APA102 LEDs (hoping there was just an interrupt problem) and add a lever shifter to hopefully get everything working like I wanted. but the same issue is occurring.
I am testing with the Disco Strobe code by Mark http://pastebin.com/enJCnzmU
Video of the issue here:
I was really hoping that switching from WS2812 to APA102 LEDs would fix the problem but it hasn’t.
So can anyone give me any suggestions as to what is happening? Is it a limitation with the ESP8266 am I using the wrong pins? I have also tried setting the LED count to 60 but the problem persists.
I also just noticed a faint flicker of red during each pause in the animation. Not sure if that helps with anything or not.
Ive noticed from your video u are not injecting power anywhere in the strip. Measure the voltage at the end to see how much u are dropping. The resistance of the strip after a few meter makes the power drop.
@Philippe_Charest thanks for the suggestion but that is not the issue. Just checked and it fluctuates between 5.1V and 5.18V. Plus my WS2812 setup has power every 45 LEDs. The video was showing the APA102 strip with the same issue.
I think I’ve narrowed it down to the IDE. I uploaded the code to a Teensy with my Windows machine and was having the same issues as previously stated. I then used my MacBook to upload the same code and it now works as intended. I’ve tried rolling back to V1.6.6 but it still has the same issue. I really want to use my Huzzah for this project but my MacBook fails to upload the code due to some serial com error.
So I did some more testing and the reason why the code was working differently with different IDEs was because of the version of FastLED that I was using. My windows machine had the newest commits as of yesterday while my MacBook was using something older. I just downloaded the initial release of V3.1 on my Windows machine and then uploaded the disco strobe code to my teensy again and it looks like it is working great again. Not sure what code changes in the newer commits are causing the issue but maybe it should be looked into? Mark, since the Disco strobe code is yours could you possibly test it out with the newest FastLED commits and see if it behaves differently from when you first wrote it?
I’ll see if I can take a look; I do like to keep those gist examples relatively current. It won’t be today, but I’ll try to make time for it. Thanks for the report.
@Mark_Kriegsman Thanks Mark! Here is a video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQlyDrmpcAg (not the greatest quality) that kind of shows the difference between the 2 versions of the library. Video description has the details.
@Mark_Kriegsman Hi Mark, sorry to bring this up again but have you ever had a chance to look at why this issue occurs with the newer releases of FastLED? I disabled the strobe effect and can clearly see the issue. I really enjoy using the disco effect but miss the smoothness that it used to have. Thanks as always.
Hi- haven’t had a chance, but thanks for the reminder. I’ll see if I can find time to check it out!
@Mark_Kriegsman Sorry to beat a dead horse but I finally managed to figure out how to fix the issue I was experiencing with the disco strobe code in newer versions of the FastLED library. It turns out something in the scale8 fix that was introduced awhile back caused the issue. I edited the FastLED config file and set FASTLED_SCALE8_FIXED to 0 and now the animation looks like I remember. Not sure if you have any ideas on how to change the code in the animation to work with the scale8 fixes but I am satisfied for now.
Ah! Thank you so much for the debugging info! Should help me find the root cause.