Howdy fellow mages! I recently picked up a number of these:
“Btf-lighting Ws2815” strips. I have three of them in series and am injecting 12v at both ends from a 200w power supply. For the life of me I can’t get them to work with the pixel blaze. I’ve tried both v2 and v3, and, in the case of v2 every possible timing option. All they do is flicker randomly (predominantly white). All three strips do the same thing.
I’ve grounded the backup data line per the data sheet. Does anyone else have experience with these particular strips? I have yet to buy a different controller and try that but thought I’d ask the wizards here first.
Both the v2 and v3 blazes I have tried work perfectly with my other apa102 and ws2012b strips, so just curious if I am missing something obvious before I send these back.
You’ll need a 5v supply for PB. Just make sure to connect gnd (negative) between both power supplies! The data signal has to be relative to a shared ground signal.
I currently have 8 ws2815 ip68 (700 pixels total) strips wired to a switch which is wired to the fuse panel. All eight strips are ran in parallel and grounded to the chassis. Pixel Blaze gets one data wire and a ground wire connected to the chassis at the same spot the strips are. PB powered by usb of course. Don’t connect the backup data wire I tried connecting it to ground and got some weird stuff going on with the lights. I figure if one of the strips goes out then I will swap out the data wire for the backup not sure why this is happening but I’ve been running them like this without the backup wire connected for 4 months now with no issues.
Hey @Twilight - I understand you that the power is wired in parallel; I’m curious, is your data being sent out to all 8 strips in a star configuration? Or is data wired serially, so each pixel can be turned on independently?
the strips are mounted on aluminum rings one strip on the outer circumference one on the inner. 4 rings total which are mounted with L brackets to the metal dust shield in the wheel well of my car. The two strips to each wheel are wired together not end to end but just. the begining of each strip. all 4 wheels are then combined down to one wire since I was using 18 gauge. I found the screw terminals in PB to small to shove any more than 1 wire into. Set the total pixels to 200 in the mapper tab in pb so all eight strips run simultaneously like if they were one strip.
