Clueless Noob trying to run wled on esp32s wroom board for first time

Issues
1

I’m a total electronics hardware noob, esp32 noob and wled noob. I had some really basic electronics classes in school long ago, but I can do basic wiring fine. (like houses and cars)

I’m trying to follow youtube tutorials to run wled on an esp32s 38 wroom board I purchased, to control addressable led strips( WS2812B).

Obviously like a fool I bought a board that doesnt’ exactly match the tutorials I’ve found (doh!), so I’m having to interpret the information to get it working. Obviously I’m failing at this step. I think what I’m doing is pretty basic, so I’m probably making an obvious and super stupid mistake… I just can’t see what it is.

The Problem:
When I hook the power and esp32s wroom to the strip, leds light up but don’t’ respond to controls.
with the led length set to 30, 8 leds light up, 7 white last one green

if i increase the length to 300 (60/m * 5m), all the leds light up, but they seem to just flicker randomly, as if the pin is just echoing the traffic on the comport and the leds are displaying bits of information…
everytime I send a change the board the flicker activity increases briefly.

Setup Process:
I had to down load the virtual com port drivers to get the esp32s to show up in win11, but once I figured that out i was able to use the website to flash the wled app onto it.

Set up the wifi and it’s connecting and shows up when I run wled app on my phone.

esp32 is still being powered via the usb micro port. (Trying to keep it simple)

led strip is being run off a 5v transformer via the 2 extra included power injection wires on the strip

Only the data line is hooked up to the esp32, currently its set up to communicate via pin 16, but I also tried it on pin 2 and got the same results (once wled was updated to the matching pin)

Here is the esp32s wroom I’m using
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B09J95SMG7/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&th=1

Photos of my setup
I tried to add a bunch of phots of my setup, but I’m limited to two links, so check my nearly Identical on the EE post on Stack Overflow for links to the photos.

https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/690158/wiled-not-communicating-to-eps32s-wroom-correctly

2

Just as someone answered on that link you provided; You need to have common ground between your controller, LEDs and Power Supply. *Add a ground wire from your controller to your LED strip.

3

Thanks, going to try it tonight!

Update: That was it, For some reason, I had to turn it off and on again in WLED before it started to work. Until then it looked pretty similar to before… scared me for a bit.

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