Hi, I am having some issues with powering the last ~150 ws28leds out of 450 (300 before the chain of 150). The last 150 led’s are having a spazz attack of random different color and brightness changes that aren’t apart of the code that it has. When I jank the wires around it starts to work correctly but the first led is spazzing out with random colors and the leds start to flicker as well. The first 300 leds are completely okay and work fine.
Arduino Uno 1.8.2
The only library I am using in the code: Adafruit_NeoPixel.h
Arduino UNO Rev3 - development board
Did I lose the first led of the chain of 150 leds and shitty soldering?
I also have CF Axial Resisters 470 ohm and I wanted to know what is the best practice on applying these? Should I have my wire that is connected to the arduino soldered to end of a resistor with the other end of the resistor being connected to the actual led input?
Thanks alot and please let me know if I need to clarify or expand on anything.
@Jason_Coon Amazon basic (performance alkalines), since I’m using the 6 x AA male dc into my arduino wouldnt my arduino uno be able to regulate that to 5v? I ran the strip of 300 leds only with it for almost 4 hours. Looking to have these leds on very low brightness for 8 hours 3 days in a row, amperage wise i would say very low usage
@Dushyant_Ahuja Thanks! I will look into decoupling capacitors. The 6 x AA doesnt have a ground just the male dc that goes straight into the arduino. My 4 x AA power supply has a ground and power wire. Can i just connect another ground from my 4 x AA to the ground between my arduino and first strip of 300 leds or from the end of the 300 strips to the beginning of the 150 led strip or both?
what do you mean with the 6AA don’t have a GND? Of course they have, battery negative goes into Uno GND, make sure that the negative of the 4AA is connected to the Uno too. Also in long data runs add a 1k resistor in series, I’ve red that it do wanders to signal integrity.
Also, based on experience, that many leds plus an uno will chew through those batteries in a few hours, even low bright. I’d be pretty impressed if you got 24 hours, but maybe. My photon with wifi off running 12 leds didn’t make it 20 hours before the charge fell too low to run the system. That’s was 4 AAA. You might have a better chance with the extra capacity, but I thought I would mention that.
@Peter_Buelow maybe the wifi is the real killer. I have a nodemcu waking up from deep sleep every minute to report sensor data via http. As it is using fixed ip it stays awake only for less than 10 seconds each minute. Even so it goes trough a 2500 mAh (so they say) lipo in about 40 hours. I know that some ESP8266 boards are reported to have spikes of 200mA but I have never observed this…
@Ricardo_Gamboa ok the negative is the GND no further actions required for this one. But make sure that the negative of the 2nd bat box is connected to the Arduino GND too.
@allanGEE Yeah, I thought about that. I had a discussion with some people in an old reddit post of mine saying that it was okay. I could always just power my arduino with a 4 x AA and the rest of the leds with like 2-3 4 x AA distributed evenly through the 450 leds to share power (seems I just need to tie all the grounds together)
This power math doesn’t add up for me, and I want to know how it works. I’ve done a lot of work with < 15 LED’s on 4AA batteries, and have never gotten past 10-15 hours with really low power electronics (relative, still more than an Uno). While I read the Uno only draws ~25ma running, 450 LED’s at a brightness of 20 is still close to 2.5amps if I’ve done my math right. Even if I’m off by a factor of 2, 1.2 amps on 4AA batteries is a HUGE number.
I hope it works. If it does, I’m moving all my battery needs to the Uno.
@Peter_Buelow i ran the first 300 leds off the arduino 5v, gnd, pin 6 (data) as shown in the diagram with the connected 6 x AA battery running a rainbow pattern for 3 hours and 45 mins (amazon basic performance alkaline). The 4 x AA connected to the last 150 leds runs longer than that. The batteries aren’t completely dead afterwards because i was able to use 2 of them for my xbox controller and its still got some juice. Im only powering these leds as a matrix to scroll patterns and text for about 20 hours during a weekend so i ended up buying a 48 pack of batteries for $13 on amazon. Hope this helps you.
People kind of got onto the power consumption topic. Did connecting the ground on the second strip to the uno solve your issue? Or, I guess, did the issue get solved one way or another?
I had an issue like you describe. For me it was a crook track or connection on one ws2811 led in my strip. I wiggled around until I found it and removed it to fix
Well, personally I worry about the power supply going to the strip of 150. It was said before, but the 4 alkalines is sending too much power. Some arduino boards can handle the extra power and regulate it down to 5v, so the 6 to your controller seems like it may be okay, but the 4 being unregulated could be a problem. If possible, I would test the 150 strip with a 5v supply to make sure none of those blew out.
Other than that, the connections seem the most likely issue. Maybe a cold solder, or even one of the wires being bad, either the data wire connecting them, or a battery wire.
