Cyclical flickering

I’m experiencing some weird flickering on a permanent setup on my house. I’m using a digquad as my controller and haven’t had any issues for 3 years. I was using these lights for Halloween less then a month ago with no issues and have not made any changes since then.

I primarily use the digquad with Xlights, but I’m having the same issue when I use WLED effects as well.

When troubleshooting with wled, I turned the string white. The string turns white as expected for about 2 seconds, then on the far end (opposite the power and data) the pixels start to flicker black/random colors. This propagates down the strand toward the input end over the course of 2 seconds. Then it turns all white again and repeats over and over.

https://imgur.com/a/MRF4So7

The same thing happens at lower brightness levels.

Someone in the Xlight’s discord says it looks like overlapping channels/data, which makes sense I’m just not sure how that possible. Anyone have any ideas?

My bet is on moisture in a connection or in the strip (least I think those are strips?)

They are bullet style pixels. How would moisture explain the repeating pattern?

If it does it from WLED as well as from xLights I doubt it’s channel overlap.

For it to be overlap in WLED you would have to have overlapping pixels in segments.

xLights does not use your segments from WLED so if it were overlap in xLights that would be a channels config issue in your xLights settings.

So unless you have 2 different overlap issues it’s got to be something else.

If you used xConnect style connectors sometimes they can loosen up a bit with the temperature swings over time and allow moisture in. I would check them.

I’ll check the connector. How would moisture explain the repeating pattern though?

It can corrupt the data stream. If the corruption is at a constant it could very well make a new unwanted pattern.