Hi, I run into a weird behavior with the brightness of the LEDs when changing max current per LED.
My LED strip includes 180 leds, connected stright to the esp32 board.
My max current is set to 1000mA as recommended.
The problem accurs when changing the max power per LED, default is 32 or 50mA, when changing to something lower like 12mA the LEDs goes brighter… Weird isn’t it?
Seeing that I figured lets try setting the calculated current per LED, 1000mA max current divided by 180 LEDs = is abit less than 6mA per LED.
So I set the max current per LED to 6mA, and the strip goes brighter, good, but when I drag the brightness up on the slider suddenly they turn off.
What im trying to figure out is why the strip is brighter when lowering current to LED and how to set it better.
You misunderstand how the ABL works.
WLED does not measure or “check” anything in the real world.
All it does is take the current/LED value (55mA, 35mA,12mA, etc) and multiply that by the total LEDs you trell it you have and then multiplies by the colour you apply to each LED (RED takes 1/3, Yelow =R+G takes 2/3, etc).
That give WLED a guess as to how much power your strip is currently using. If that number is more than the size of power supply you told it about earlier, it scales the brightness of the whole strip down until its under.
When you tell WLED your LEDs take less power each, it merrily lets you up the brightness as it thinks you’re taking less power from your supply than is really happening.
This is the basic problem with using something like the ABL to mange the load on your power supply, it’s just a guess.
You’ll be much better off in the long run if you make sure your power supply is capable handling the full worst case load of your strip.