Using a trinket 5v and Arduino 1.0.5 (from adafruit) and a tm1804 strip of 30 I can not get the blink example to work; nothing lights up. My scope is not fast enough to capture the individual bits, but the stream is 2ms long for 30 leds. Do I have a timing issue or does this seem reasonable? Any ideas what I might try?
It seems that you might have some power issues??? What version of FastLED are you using?
FastLED version 3.000.002. Why do you suspect power?
@Tim_Hayward stating the obvious, but make sure your data line from the trinket is connected to the data in pin on the strip.
Also is this an Adafruit Trinket pro?
thanks Stuart. It isn’t obvious, but I am on that end of the chain. I am using this LED strip https://www.pololu.com/product/2543
and I am not using the Trinket Pro, Just the 5v trinket.
How are you powering the rig? Is the trinket providing the 5v to the strips thru the USB port on the computer? Are you using LEDS.setbrightness(128) in your code to limit the power draw to the LEDs at 50%?
I am powering the LEDs with a bench supply(5v) The trinket is powered by USB. They have common ground. I am using the fastLED/blink example, but have changed the data pin, number of LEDs, and uncommented the tm1804 line.
Most issues here, at first are power related/wiring issues. Have you tried to inject the data line to the second LED in the chain? Perhaps its a bad solder joint on the connector?
On occasion, as I am hooking things up noise will trigger the string and load the LEDs with random data, so I don’t think the data connection is bad.
So, did you run the RGB Calibrate sketch? I suspect that your color order is different than that of the demo sketch. The stock blink example only show the color Red, so if you were a color order of GBR then you would never see the data, make sense?
Wouldn’t I get a blinking green if my color order is wrong? I went ahead and changed it to blink white, and still get nothing.
I am beginning to think I may have the low-speed version of the tm1804 instead of the high speed version.
I see that TM1804 have similar timings to ws2811/ws2812 types.
30 Leds @ 30usec per LED is 0.9 msec if data is 800khz.
If you are getting ~ 2ms I’m assuming data is getting out at 400khz.
Could that be your problem ?
@Tim_Hayward
I guess tis the opposite. you say your data burst measured around 2ms maybe you want to have the data sent at a higher speed !!
Thanks JP! That was one issue. I had the IDE set to the wrong target (set for trinket @16mhz instead of 8.) Now the pulse looks like it is a little under 1ms. Still not getting anything on the led strip.
I have a working array of 16 strips of 25 WS2812b and just now replaced the first
strip’s definition from ‘NEOPIXEL’ to ‘TM1804’ and it worked just fine (a part for
color order that I had to change to GRB)
So by default, it would seem that it sends data at 800khz rate.
If you think you have a low speed version of the strip, maybe try the ‘WS2811_400’ definition for the LED type !?
Hmmm. No joy with the _400 either. I guess it is time to buy new hardware so at least I know what I have. Thanks JP. If I was getting the wrong colors or wrong led I would have somewhere to start.
How about bypassing one (or more) pixels in your strip !?
Bypassed the first two, and got no change. I really looks like the strip is ok. I can load it with random data.
@Tim_Hayward , you need to be able to either swap your Microcontroller or the strip, ideally both to troubleshoot this !
If you can get ws2811/ws2812 to work correctly than u know the Trinket is correctly set.
If u have a Arduino Uno for example and are able to light up that TM1804 strip Ok than you know your strip is fine !