Hi. I have a strip of WS2812B LEDs that’s controlled with a Wemos mini D1 and uses WLED. On Sunday, it was fine. Nothing changed, now suddenly it doesn’t work.
When I connect power there’s a flash of the first LED on the strip plus the little blue power light on the board. I’ve tried pinging the IP address of the strip and it erratically and intermittently times out. Sometimes the loss is only 50%. Sometimes it’s much higher.
The problem is, I’m tapped out now as to how all this works and how to fix it. I didn’t put all this together, it was done for me, and I’m not able to contact the person who made it to get help from them.
Is there anyone here who can help please? Also, if this setup is dead, is there a way to make a similar one but that’s less techie? I don’t really know anything about electronics so I don’t know if I could build this myself.
Thanks so much in advance. I’m very grateful for any help / advice.
Some kind of power supply(s) to power the LEDs and the ESP board that runs WLED.
There may be a single supply or some combination of multiple supplies.
The ESP board will likely use 5V, sometimes via USB, other times via a standalone supply.
An ESP based controller with an ESP8266 or ESP32 chip onboard. That controller is the part that runs the WLED softwareand gives you the GUI page you can log into with a browser. It also generates the data stream for the LEDs that gives you lights/colours/effects/ etc.
LEDs That’s the part that actually generates light in the colours you choose.
The LEDs need both proper power and data. Sometimes (for small setups) they’re powered directly from the ESP controller. Other times, they have a separate power connection. They will always have a data connection as that is required for them to produce any light at all.
If you can post some more details about your setup - how many LEDs/what kind of power supply(s)/what kind of controller, and even a few pics, we may be able to help you diagnose your issue(s)
Are you by any chance using version 0.14.1?
If so, try with version 0.14.0. For me 0.14.1 has numerous issues for example connection drops and effect freezes etc.
WLED (running on your controller board) connects to your home WiFi network if configured with the SSID and password. If it’s not configured (properly) the board will create a “hot-spot” WiFi access point (AP) that you can connect to with your phone/tablet.
You can look for the AP under your WiFi settings, it will be called WLED-AP. Choose that and if it asks for a password, use “1234”. You should then be able to go to a browser and it should show you the WLED GUI - a web page that lets you control your WLED board. On that page you’ll see a button near the top labelled “Info”. Pressing that will pop up a page with a bunch of useful details about your setup.
