I’m from India, recently we’ve celebrated Diwali - Festival of Lights, for Diwali decoration I had created 32 x 25 RGB setup for my Flat’s Window that light up to 16 days…
Initially tried to setup everything on breadboard/prototype board with tsx0108e as level shifter and 8 strings of 100 WS2812b leds with ESP32 in parallel mode (using 8 GPIO pins) tried everything but didn’t succeed. After trying all possible connection changes for 4 days nothing worked for me at last I connected all 8 strings to ESP32 GPIO ports directly and viola it worked… initially I was afraid this setup will burn my ESP as I had read several articles on web regarding not to connect strings directly with ESP ports.
As I didn’t had much time to re-setup so I used this setup and hung all 8 strings @ 32x25 setup on my window, somewhere in my mind I was still thinking this setup will burn out my ESP but it didn’t and goes on for 16 nights (6pm to 7am) and still everything is fine no harm to wires, ESP, Led String all worked superb with WLED…
THANKS WLED…
So my question is what I could have missed in my setup with level shifter or can we avoid using levelshifters for small setups upto 1000 leds on 10 port…
If your setup works without a levelshifter, that’s great!
Unfortunately, just because your current setup works now, doesn’t mean you’re guaranteed it will work in the future. The reality is the ESP32 cannot output a 5V level to drive addressable LEDs. You’re using a setup that is “out of spec”.
That said, I’ve had success with many setups that connect directly to ESP32’s as well.
You just have to aware that the need for 5V data may come back if your setup changes.
Don’t worry about “burning your ESP board” because of too many led data connections. You can’t harm the board by asking it to produce multiple data connections, that’s what WLED does. It might not be fast enough for the effects you’d like when you get to large numbers, but it won’t hurt the board.
The only risk of “burning” comes when people try and use their ESP boards to make power connections as well as data. Unless the board is specifically made to handle that (many are not) the power required can become too much for the wiring and things overheat.
As far as actually getting the levelshifter to work, my suggestion is to be methodical and try to get one string at a time working.
There are versions of the WS2812b (currently the V5) that do not require level shifters, and can take 3.3V data in when powered at 5V. However, getting them can be a little bit of a hit or miss. So, if you can get it to work without a level shifter, great. But it’s not guaranteed that if you get some new ones, that you’ll get V5 again, you could get some V4 instead, which does not work without the level shifter.
As for why it didn’t work, hard to say without a wiring diagram. OP probably doesn’t care, because it worked without, but for anyone stumbling on this looking for help, it’s possible that the OE pin wasn’t pulled up. (10k resistor is probably fine for pulling it up?)
workes also with a 1kResistor on Datapin BUT keep in MIND 3feet/or 1Meter Cable length at max
There is also a small issue i got run into it took nearly 2min for the data to get astablished on power
around the 200-210th Pixel even with incection every 150pixel i saw colorfailues they disapear after a while
THIS has not been the case with Levelshifter on ESP32 / No problem on ESP8266 MY Personal discover