Repeated Errors

1

I have been working with my ninth PB and have run into a problem. The controller started behaving erratically and several attempts to reset and start over have failed. The initial weirdness was that it was ignoring the brightness settings and just going whole hog on intensity which caused the input voltage to droop. I am using an HP current limited power supply set to 1 amp and driving 512 WS1812B lights.

I’m getting a message that says “The controller has restarted from repeated errors and has loaded fail-safe settings. Proceed with caution- using this interface may persist fail-safe settings”.

It sounds pretty dire and I am clueless as to what caution means in this case. Is at a bad PB or am I being bad?

2

Sounds like the controller is browning out due to a voltage drop. Give it more amps or disconnect the LEDs, try to recover it.

1 amp is nowhere near enough to run 512 LEDs.

It’s possible your short on storage too, how much shows free? Low storage can also cause config saving issues.

If you do anything in the interface when failsafe settings are loaded, it will overwrite your old settings.

1 Like
3

Thanks.

I am running the display at low current while getting things going. Typically I was drawing under 700mA.

I am interested in how to check storage. I have not done that before.

Another thing I am curious about is the two settings for LED intensity. One is in the settings and is a percentage. The other is a slider on the patterns page. Do they interact or what?

Thanks for taking the time to help out.

4

I found the storage (next to the pattern link) 266K is the number.

In any case it looks like the problem has gone away. All I can think is that the
voltage droop put the PB into a state of weird.

I’ll do more testing another time, the garage is too warm to be comfortable.

Thanks again.

5

If average was 700ma with LEDs (which is still pretty crazy for that many LEDs), you could see a few millisecond duration spikes up to 500ma higher during radio activity, during which your power supply would cut the power and the chip can brown out.

6

True enough. I’m definitely not scoping the power supply.

I’m using stock patterns so all the LEDs are not lit at one time. And everything is
nice and bright.

One final question; there are two LED brightness controls, one in set-up is a percentage and one on the pattern page which is a slider.

Which one wins?

7

It’s a combination. You can think of the max brightness as a hard stop, but really it is multiplied with the slider, then with the pattern values.

1 Like
8

Fantastic. Thanks.

I have a lot of fun with these units. I just use the pre-programmed patterns but try to come up with good ways of displaying them.

Cheers.

1 Like