Hey everyone, I have a strip of 244 dot stars ruining,

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Hey everyone,

I have a strip of 244 dot stars ruining,
my original setup was with a mega and the Strip powered from the center with a large power supply

randomly a would get a kind of flash on the far end of the strip. but i wast that bad so im mostly ignored it.

now i want to add the strip to my openhab setup, so i got a partial red-board from sparkfun and ruining the demo reel code, which worked fine on my mega

the LEDS towards the end of the strip are brighter (alot) and the flash constantly

Any one have any ideas what maybe be the cause of this?

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How did you connect the strip? There is a troubleshoot document flying around somewhere here (but I couldn’t find it – must have chosen the wrong keywords) with some partly esoteric solutions that worked in some cases, like connecting a capacitor to the power wires, adding a resistor to the data pin, connecting the far end of the data pin to ground or connecting both ends of the strip to power. And I believe a few more – I hope someone else’s memory here works better …

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Lower the data rate for the LEDs in the setup function.

"Finally, sometimes you may want to change the data rate that you are running your leds at. In this case, you’ll also need to specify the RGB ordering:

void setup() { FastLED.addLeds<APA102, RGB, DATA_RATE_MHZ(12)>(leds, NUM_LEDS); }"

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can you give information about the power supply?
@Ulrich_Bogun https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-neopixel-uberguide/best-practices

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It’s usually better to power equally along the LEDs, than to have 1 large supply. Can you test with smaller supplies?

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Hey sorry i was away for the weekend,

it powered in the center of the strip with a medium sized supply. i cant remember what it was exactly, it 2 reels together which has about 300 leds all together

ill try both suggestions tonight and let you know the results

thanks for the help so far

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FYI i know the power is the right size, i remember hunting around for about a week to get the right supply and having to do the simple math to figure it out

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So i did some tests,

  1. i first tried to lower the brightness got the same result although my colors are off
  2. connected data to ground at the end of the strip
  3. put a logic level converter between the strip and the board
  4. reduced the number of LEDS
  5. tried on another DOTSTAR strip i had on hand

All gave the same results

so i stopped using the the demo reel sketch and created my own, which just added 1 LED per loop and made them red with a small delay

when starting the strip upto the point when the number LEDS in configured turns to a dark blue and whats meant to be red turns to a lighter blue over time

when i try to change the color order it for some reasons changes from the dark blue to a slight lighter shade AND some of the LEDS on the far end are not being used

i tested with the same physical set up with the DOTSTAR lib and it worked fine, i changed the test sketch so all LEDS would be on at full brightness to test the power i get the same results

i also tried both software spi and hardware spi but no luck here either :frowning:

Any ideas?

all i want is to be able to change the LEDS over wifi anyone have a proposal for a better board the the photon?

Thanks
AJ

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@Andrew_Jackson Last year I had a hardware problem with bad solder joints https://plus.google.com/116700996827719272404/posts/XiJRonqQEaq

My favourite board is the Adafruit Feather Huzzah

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ill take a look tonight