Hi, I've been using FastSPI_LED2 with great success with a WS2811 strip of 300

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1

Hi,

I’ve been using FastSPI_LED2 with great success with a WS2811 strip of 300 LEDs. I’ve made a 30x10 display and have hooked up the WiFi Shield in order to grab weather info and current time from my webserver. This is all working fine, but I’ve hit a wall when I tried to get the Micro SD card reader working.

I understand that the Wifi uses pin 10 for SS and the SD slot uses pin 4.

I currently have my strip in Pin 6 and I’m totally stumped.

The script I have works fine when I comment out the LEDS.addLeds line, but as soon as I uncomment it, it just dies.

Any ideas?

Hopefully this will let me post my code.

#include <SD.h>
#include “FastSPI_LED2.h”
#include <avr/pgmspace.h>
#define NUM_LEDS 300
#define BUFFPIXEL 20
CRGB leds[NUM_LEDS];
File bmpFile;
void setup() {
Serial.begin(9600);
LEDS.setBrightness(32);
LEDS.addLeds<WS2811, 6>(leds, NUM_LEDS); //the bad line
delay(10);
pinMode(SS, OUTPUT);
if (!SD.begin(4)) {
Serial.println(“initialization failed!”);
return;
}
Serial.println(“initialization done.”);
bmpDraw(“filetest.bmp”, 0, 0);
}

2

I’ve been trying on RC2 and have just discovered RC3 but still no joy.

3

Do you get either of your initialization strings printed out?

4

Not with the LEDS.addLeds line uncommented. They do print out when it’s commented out though.

5

And what are you running on?

6

Arduino Uno R3
IDE 1.0.2 - 1.0.5 hates the Wifi shield.
Official WiFi Shield
FastSPI_LED2 RC3

7

Can you add prints right after the addLeds, the delay, and the pinMode lines? I’m curious which statement it is that things are stopping at.

Also - do you have any other large buffers defined? You have 2k of ram and 900 bytes of that is eaten up with your led array.

8

Without having seen any other output or comments, I am sort of suspecting an out-of-memory condition, maybe heap-meets-stack-and-goes-boom. I don’t know how much memory the SD library takes.

One thing to try is to see if you set NUM_LEDS to a much smaller number (eg, 100 instead of 300) if you still have the same results, or if it changes.

9

Well I’ll be! I changed the LED count down to 10 and the serial outputs displayed. I found 50 was fine, but when I set it to 100, it died again.

Luckily I have a Mega 2560 and I switched it over and now I’m in business.

I’ll post a video of what I’ve been up to soon. I’m going to be doing a presentation on this to the London Arduino group in a few weeks and I’ll be bigging up your work.

You guys are gentlemen of the highest order. Keep up the good work.