Hi,
I’m using Fastled 3.1. I have 3 Neopixel 12 LED rings wired as one strip, fed by data pin 6 from an Arduino Mega; I have 2 APA102 60 LED strips wired as one fed by pins 2 and 3 for data and clock from the same Arduino, and another 2 APA102 60 LED strips wired as one fed by pins 4 and 5 for data and clock. The two sets of double length APA102 strips are mirrored to show the same effects.
Issue 1: All is working well, I’m happy with code after using these for a few months. The main, quite simple effect, required is a colour fade on the APA102 strips, and a different colour fade on the Neopixel rings, simultaneously happening. I created two colour blends using fill_gradient_RGB(), each with 4 RGB colours, one blend for the NEOs, one for the APA102s. All is well there and it works fine. If I change the blend to have 3 RGB colours for the APA102s, the code compiles, uploads to the Arduino, but nothing happens. But it will work again with 2 RGB colours in the blend. Interestingly I can change the NEO blend to 2 and 3 RGBs and it will work fine. I use EVERY_N_MILLISECONDS(10) to control the colour changes and loop.
Issue 2: I had flickering on the APA102 strips which I solved with ground wrapping the data and clock lines, but the biggest help was to reduce the data rate to the APA102s with DATA_RATE_KHZ(1) in the FastLED.addleds declaration. I’m happy there, but the NEO data rate dropped also even though it was not explicitly set or changed in its FastLED.addleds declaration. Was that data rate change for the NEOs expected?
Thanks for any advice or info.
Oliver.