One issue I am having is when I’m driving more than half of my 114 LED’s at full brightness I get an occasional single frame of random colors and it then goes back to the animation. Some animations seem more suceptible to this than others. I’m still using the animations from the FastLED Demo showing how to use pallettes. It doesn’t happen when I turn down the brightness to about half or less. It also doesn’t happen when I activate less than 60 NeoPixels even at full brightness. between 60 and 114 I will get the random pulses but only on the active NeoPixels. The disabled ones stay dark. I’ll post a video of this when I get home tonight
Sounds like a power draw issue.
With everything on I get volts as low as 2.5 at the far end of the rectangle. I get just over 4 when the power leaves the enclosure. Meaning a 1 v drop for all the other electronics.
I’m using 22awg for the mock-up. I’m using 14awg for the amp itself.
Yup - definitely a power draw issue then - you need to inject power at the other end of your strip. Also, you should be giving 4.8-5v to the leds - starting at 4 and letting it drop from there is going to mess with the leds (as you’re seeing) - it’ll be even worse if what you’re driving are WS2812’s, as the voltage drop will mess with the WS2812’s ability to time/detect the signal coming down the line.
…which I am.
From the input on the upper-left corner I’m sending out ground & vcc to each corner. As I said, I’m using Belden audio cable for the mock-up and plan to use 14 gauge for the real thing. That should help my voltage drop issue, shouldn’t it?
I was thinking about just running some 14 gauge wire to each corner of the mock-up anyway.
114 leds at 60mA full bright is 6.84 amps - 22 gauge taps out at about an amp. It’s a power distribution/wiring problem - you’re starving the leds.
So, you think that once I replace all of the 22awg with 14awg I should be ok? I don’t have a lot of extra room in the enclosure for a second boost converter for the NeoPixel power.
Maybe? Also - what’re you using as a converter, and what’s the max amp output of your converter?
I’ve got a 15A 5V power supply going into the enclosure, which I then take a tap from and boost it to 7.2V to power the microcontroller. I then feed 5V to the other electronic components. I’m sending the raw 5V through a MOSFET and then directly to the cable for the NeoPixels.