Follower Board Booting Before Leader and Patterns Out of Sync

Troubleshooting
1

I’ve been doing some testing with two Pixelblazes running in leader/follower mode, and I’ve noticed an odd startup behavior.

The follower Pixelblaze consistently boots before the leader. Because of that, it initially starts playing the rainbow font pattern that is saved as the first pattern in its local playlist. Once the leader finishes booting, the follower switches over to the leader’s animation as expected.

However, the first synchronized animation is always offset between the two boards. When the playlist advances to the second pattern, the boards immediately become perfectly synchronized and stay in sync from that point on.

Has anyone seen this behavior before or know what might be causing it?

I’d really like to solve this because I sell these LED garments. For the first 10 seconds after power up, the outfit appears to be malfunctioning until the boards finally synchronize which obviously isn’t ideal for customers.

I’ve attached two videos:

  • One showing the LEDs on the follower board starting up before the leader.

  • Another showing the status LEDs on the follower Pixelblaze booting before the leader Pixelblaze.

Edit: I was not able to upload the videos even after compressing the MP4 file. I had to upload screenshots. Let me know if there is a different way to upload the videos.

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2

Sorry about the videos! The forum system is picky, sometimes it’s better to upload a video to YouTube or something.

So on first boot it does take a little while for WiFi to start up and connect and sync to get locked in. You can config them to start with a pattern that makes this less obvious, but can’t really remove it entirely. If leader and follower both start to the same pattern, then when sync starts it will be less of a difference. A static color, or something random enough not to be distracting, like blink fade or something.

Once sync initially connects it starts syncing animation time bases, so there might be a jump for the first sync, should be smooth from there. Also some patterns have their own running timers/state that doesn’t use the time based sync, so those only work when the pattern switches at the same time.

It’s also possible to set the first pattern in the playlist to run for a short time, so that when the follower does connect and sync, soon after you’d get a switch to something that brings both more in sync. Has to be long enough to let WiFi and follower connect.