I may have shorted the controller at some point today. But it is still displaying patterns, only i cant get any white or depth of color to display. All the patterns just display mostly red green and blue but not much color mixing is happening. Anytime a pattern is white is either turns off the white colors or just replaces white with red.
Could this be a sign the controller is blown? Unfortunately i dont have a spare controller to troubleshoot with
Using ws2815 leds
Settings:
Set to ws281x
Color order set to grb
This sounds like a low-voltage problem at the LED strip, especially if red is the last color to disappear. Check the +12 voltage at the input of the strip, especially when you’re trying to display white.
Good call. Power was connected to the pixelblaze instead of the 12v power supply. I connected everything back up, and it began to display things correctly, but then it slowly went from fireflies pattern to random colors with no discernable pattern. Checked and it was still on fireflies pattern.
So the controller might still be the cause? Bad data? I am getting 12v at the strip now.
I am using one power supply with a buck converter for the the pixelblaze. So Ground is all shared properly
I believe the backup data and +12v may have been shorted at one point. Could this damage the pixelblaze or leds, or both? What might cause the pattern to show correctly for ~30s then degrade into random chaos?
I tested the original leds woth a wled controller and they work fine, though i noticed a few pixels are dead in the run.
I tested a different led strip on the pixelblaze and its all works perfectly.
I dont understand how the original led strips work on the wled controller but not pixelblaze but im guessing the leds are the problem at this point based on the dead pixels in brand new strips, likely from a short
Update: i reconnected the original led run to the pixelblaze and now i cannot recreate the issue. It seems to work fine and no dead pixels. Im not cut out for this troublesheeting stuff haha
It always helps when you can provide clear photos showing all of your connections and equipment, so others can get a good idea of the setup. The model or specs of your power supply, and the number of LEDs you’re driving are also important info.
I wonder if your power supply is underrated, and may be going into current limiting after warming up?
Good point, if it starts acting up again I will post in more detail with photos. But I am running a meanwell 12v 29A power supply, and about 300-400 leds were connected at the time. I did have a ~20ft data connection that could have had something to do with it. Or the shorting incident. With the long data line I expected to see some glitching rather than complete data corruption, but I had never experimented with that before.
Yeah, 20ft is a fair bit of distance but should work in most setups. Glitching can be dependent on stuff thats going on nearby if it’s getting interference.
It does sound like it might have been a flaky connection though. That would explain why it started working once you connected it to a different controller, then still worked when you switched back. If it happens again, give everything a wiggle test.
In this video i have only channels 0 and 2 of the output expander connected.
I am running a 12v 29 amp meanwell powerr supply. Pixelblaze and output expander powered through a buck converter. 12 awg power cables to 18 awg when it splits into my 3 parallel runs. 18 awg for data. First and second run have about 400 leds each.
It happens when i remove the data direct to pixelblaze and connect throught the output expander. Did a wiggle test with no change.
The data lines all go through one cable so maybe some interference there? The data line cable is also about 20 ft long (i plan to move the controller into my fuse box which is a much shorter distance to the leds). Here is a crude schematic:
Is the led color order set the same in the output expander configuration table & the color order drop down above the table?
I would definitely shorten the data lines, or add in a light in the middle of the wire to see if repeating the data signal will help. A bit of messing around, but you’ll only need to test on one line to see if it works.
When you say its glitching, do you mean its always doing this, with some LEDs frozen, and others doing something? That does not look like a signal issue, unless it is quite severe. Glitching caused by signal problems causes flicker, but most LEDs will still animate. Its possible that so much signal is lost that only a tiny fraction of the pulses are making it through, but I wouldn’t expect that with only 20ft.
It does look like possibly misconfigured channels as @mnielsen said. I’d double check color order, and make sure you have WS2815 and not WS2814 or something that actually uses 4 element RGBW instead of 3 element RGB. Each channel on the output expander has it’s own color order you have to set individually. Picking a 3 element color order when you have 4 element LEDs will cause about 25% of your LEDs to not get data and freeze to whatever the last color was, but this does appear to be losing a lot more LEDs.
The other possible issue could be with the GND return from data. If data and GND take different paths, they can cause more signal problems. If you are going to move the PB closer anyway, it’s worth trying to see if that fixes things if the settings don’t help.
I moved the buck converter, PB and output expander to the fuse box about 4 ft from from the sculpture and everything works perfectly. I simply removed the long data wire cable. Thank you both for your help solving this!
