I recently bought a WS-compatible mosfet driver board from [Northern Lights Electronic Design, LLC - Minneapolis, MN]
I was looking to combine ledstrips with a power RGB spotlight. It works fine but causes a lot of noise and sparks on the data line. Anyone with some experience could help me out? These boards act like a WS2814 pixel and can be put everywhere you like. But regardless of their position, the noise goes everywhere.
Thatâs interesting, thanks for sharing what youâve experienced with this.
When you say sparks on the data line, is that maybe an autocorrect for âspikesâ, IE something youâre observing with a scope?
Or is it maybe that you can tell theres a problem because other pixels on the same serial data line start to glitch?
I have two ideas for you, but to implement them I think youâll need some help from LLMs/Google/Electronics StackExchange. First is to use an optoisolator on the data line. Make sure itâs rated for at least 800KHz.
Second, maybe the power draw of the longer RGB strip, especially when pulsed at the 200KHz PWM rate of the WS2814 chip, is inducing noise on the power lines to your other individually addressable LEDs. Your options here could be to either use separate power supplies (be sure all DC grounds have a common connection), or try to add a beefy capacitor across your existing power rails.
A cheap scope capable of sampling 1MHz (>50Msamples/sec), typically the ones >$60 on Amazon, could help you isolate where the noise really lives and under what WS2814 conditions (off? Constant high / low? Animations?) the noise causes the problem.
1 Like
Maybe something like this might work? WS2811 / WS2812 Extender âfrom eagledecorationsâ alternative perhaps? not sure i understand the issue but have used that to control 3 âhigh powerâ LED channels. and worked for what i needed. but i donât understand the issue and YMMV. 