I dismantled a setup where I had my WS2811 strand working with FastLED on

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I dismantled a setup where I had my WS2811 strand working with FastLED on a photon. I’ve just set it up again with exactly the same program running and it’s now not working… I’ve attached a pic of the setup and here’s a vine https://vine.co/v/izV1VFKwFL9 showing the LED behaviour… I can’t work out whether I’m doing something silly. Any ideas? The only thing I can think that’s different from the setup before is that my MSGEQ7 shield is no longer occupying inactive I/O lines…

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Oh yeah, I also understand that i’m mixing 5v and 3.3v logic, but it worked pretty well regardless before!

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So I get the same inconsistent behavior with mine. I suspect the tolerances are pretty close to what the strand supports, so you may have encountered a hidden variable. I just ordered level converters for my strand setup to see if that helps. We’ll see.

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Hi Peter, thanks for the message. I had a level converter lying around and have just tried it but it doesn’t seem to make a difference… unless I’ve not wired it up correctly… Could anyone confirm? http://imgur.com/poJFm8v

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I worked out where I think my problems were stemming from… the smoothing capacitor I’ve been told I should use for these leds! If I power the photon from the 5v power source that has the smoothing capacitor on rather than another line straight from the power source, all leds work great with no flickering at all. Didn’t need the level converter! Yessss!

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Is the photon 5v GPIO or not? I thought it was, but the online docs say it’s 3.3. I built a strip controller assuming it was 5v, but am adding a level converter because it would only light one pixel, and always weird. I assumed it was the data pin. Maybe not now. Odd.