Hey all—hoping someone can help me figure this out. I’ve got everything fully assembled and connected, but I’ve run into a strange issue: only ports 1 and 2 on my ProExpander are working. No matter what I try, ports 3 and 4 won’t light up any LEDs.
I’ve done a bunch of testing—swapping known-working LED strips from ports 1 and 2 to ports 3 and 4, double-checked power and connections, etc. The strips themselves are fine, but nothing lights up on ports 3 and 4.
Also, as you can see in the attached photo, I’m having trouble getting it to auto-index or detect anything on those two non-working ports. It just sort of… stalls out. On top of that, it wont let me set the number of LED to 900 not 1800.
i should also note I am trying to have all three strips repeat the same thing at the same time, so they are not linked in a zig zag fashion for power or data.
SO maddening, I’m so close to making great progress on this project. Every time I hit auto index it does this despite there being a 3rd strip installed.
First, you might have missed (and I forgot to evaluate this when coaching you earlier) that the output expander has a max-pixels-per-channel spec:
Each channel can have its own LED color ordering setting, and can support a mix of RGB and RGBW across channels or LED types, and any mix of length, up to 800 RGB pixels or 600 RGBW pixels per channel for the WS2812 / NeoPixel types, and 600 LEDs for the APA102 / DotStar types. That’s up to 6,400 pixels per board, or 51,200 with eight!
So 900 LEDs on one channel won’t be accepted (we can agree there should be a clearer error message for this).
Second, if you have three strips of 5m 60/m, you have 300 LEDs per channel. You need to enter “300” three times under the “Count” column, not “300, 600, 900” as shown. Then after pressing “Auto”, Start Index should autofill with [0, 300, 600], and the overall Pixel count above this table will read “900”.
Okay, I’m mostly understanding whats going on.
Right now I just need everything to light up as a work around. How then do I index 3 strips to get them to all light up for the time being even if not on a single channel?
Later on I will want to make them a matrix that is 3 rows tall by 300 columns.
You do it in code (to replicate every 300), either with a map or copy-pasting one-off shim code (like “index = index %300” just inside render(){).
To just make sure they’re all working however, take the brightness slider in the top right, slide it all the way left. Go to the edit tab, hit “new pattern” button, then shift the slider ever so slightly back to the right and see if they all turn on.
