Hi all! I have been struggling with a particularly tricky situation to troubleshoot and

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Hi all! I have been struggling with a particularly tricky situation to troubleshoot and I am wondering if anyone has seen what I am seeing.

I am running some effects on the arduino Nano board on these 12V WS2811 milky balls from Ray Wu:

I’ve never worked with higher voltage ws2811 but I thought I’d try it anyways. I am running a 40 piece strip (6 LEDs per ball) with a data and ground coming in through the front end of the strip and connected to the arduino and the very end of it has 12V and GND wired to the power supply. The lights all light up and work as intended with my program EXCEPT after about 28 seconds they freeze and no longer update. I have tried different arduino nanos, power supplys, and it happens both with the adafruit library and fastled2 library. Has anyone else ever seen this bizarre kind of behavior? Something’s fishy here…

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as i started dabbling around some more with this it appears to be a signaling frequency issue. Managed to get it to keep running with the adafruit library by declaring it as a 400Khz neopixel strip. Is it possible to do this with the FastLED library? Thanks in advance for your support!

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Yes! The chip type is WS2811_400 for the 400Khz version.

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Fascinating that they work pushing data through them at 800khz for a bit. Also, sucks that those balls are running at 400khz :frowning: