Hello all,
I’ve been playing with WLED for a few years, and last year I did my first big installation and it went okay, if not amateurish. I introduced some power injection to help the colors persist at the end of the runs and then this problem appeared (which I’ll outline in a moment). At some point, it stopped happening and everything was working correctly, and then this weekend the problem manifested itself again (after my non-permanent storage got bumped - I did say amateur).
What is happening?
- At low brightness / some colors (blue colors or low brightness yellows), the entire run works fine and doesn’t have any voltage drop.
- At high brightness (really above 30%) and with some colors (most noticeable with Reds) the strip starts freaking out and “spazing” with non-sensical and animated colors (prime colors?). It is an obvious “oh that’s not right” style spazing.
What is my setup?
- HiLetgo ESP-WROOM-32 ESP32 ESP-32S Development Board (running the latest version of WLED)
- BTF-LIGHTING WS2812B RGB 5050SMD Individual Addressable 16.4FT 60Pixels/m 300Pixels
** 1060 Pixels long. Power injection around 750.
** Strips are mostly daisy chained via soldering (led > wire > led, etc), but some are clip connected (soldering was a skill I didn’t posses going in and was trying to limit my requirement, but those LED connector clips to wires kinda stink) - BTF-LIGHTING AC100-240V to DC5V60A Max300W Suit DC5V1A~DC5V60A
- Quin-LED Data booster
- Fuses between the power supply and first LED for both the hot wire and the hot power injection (separate)
- Neutral wire from the main feed and the power injection I’ve had on the same PSU post and different with no effect
- 18/3 Wire for most of the wiring, although in a few spots near the board it just uses the included wires with the strips, or in one case 22 AWG between the board and the data booster. (typing this up, this feels like a weak spot, is it? Should I use the 18 here?)
Yes, I know that WLED says that any strips longer than 800 LED’s can have weird results, but I have a mirrored setup with 1007 LED’s that do NOT exhibit this behavior. (and to be fair, that setup doesn’t use a databooster as that was one of the troubleshooting steps I’ve tried to experiment with).
(had to delete pictures due to being a new user, have them on demand)
This is a picture of how it looks when it is spazing:
Edit: Video: Imgur: The magic of the Internet
(You can see this spazing doesn’t happen to the entire strip, the bottom shelf lights are fine)
I’ve tried to figure this out on my own, but I’m stumped as to why one side is working fine, and the other isn’t. Especially since I didn’t do anything but bump things to make it stop working. Not to mention I went from Spazing to not Spazing to Spazing once more with really only bumping the setup. No real configuration changes. So it wants to work, but some weakness in the setup causes the spazing. Here is it in a working state:
(https://i.imgur.com/Dl44sRS.jpeg)
I appreciate you taking the time to read this post and provide any further insight. I know I should get an enclosure to prevent wire movement, but I’m reallllllllly stumped as this is all self taught and for some reason THAT is something I haven’t experimented with much.
Cheers,