My initial setup was an ESP82266, and a strip with 277leds, it was powered by a voltage converter (a good powerful one) from 12v to 5V (as it was mounted on a car).
I made the configs, all my presets and playlist without any problem using the WLED’s network(since it’s not connected to any real network), and it was working perfectly many times until I remove the current limit.
I had limited to 4000ma, and since I deactivated it, the WLED wifi appears, but if I try to connect it, it disappears after a few seconds, making it impossible to open the page or app connection. but the playlist continues to work correctly.
Disconnecting the LEDs from the esp8266 (avoid current problems) does not solve the problem.(voltages are stabe)
At the moment, with just the ESP8266 turned on (without LEDs) I cannot access the page. The Wifi goes off in seconds.
Any idea?
Will it be possible to at least backup the presets via serial?
Are you using a development board, or your own custom PCB?
It may be that the LEDs are now grabbing enough power that for a moment the voltage is dropping on the MCU and causing it to brownout (the power demands when using the Wifi can be several times larger than when not using the Wifi). Typically, the circuit should have a capacitor across the power and ground pins of the MCU and close to it, and a bigger one across and close to the LED power and ground leads. Power may be available from the power supply, but not instantaneously everywhere it is needed, which is what the caps address.
Also for a custom board, it’s important to add pullup resistors on EN and RST. Without them, the circuit might work sometimes and at other times reboot seemingly at random.
It’s a custom one, an esp8266 12f with an AMS1117 3.3v, the appropriate capacitor and the EN and RST resistors.
It was working 100% until I changed this current limiter setting.
Even after that, the script continues to run correctly. I just don’t have access to the WLED page.
At this moment, I was trying to recover the presets, so I removed the LEDs, changed the power supply on ESP to a 3.6V one (basically just the ESP and power supply) and I still can’t change anything.
The wifi network exists, I can connect to it, but when opening the page (4.3.2.1) it drops completely. It only appears again after turning the power off and on.
If i wire again the LEDs, the script still runing like a charm
You may have a combination of issues where the LEDs are required for proper power up (due to GPIO used) and the change in limiter settings allows the LEDs to draw too much from your supply.
Try limiting reducing the physical # of LEDs you attach to the board to a very small number (<5) and see if you can power up the board reliably.
That should let you move forward and try adding LEDs incrementally to see where the power issues begin.
It looks like you have memory issue. RAM gets depleted when you try to connect.
You may not be able to recover unless you somehow reduce RAM usage (less LEDs or version that uses less RAM). Try flashing older version i.e. 0.13.3.
After a long time and many reboot attempts, I was able to access the page and make a backup.
Since then it has been working correctly (still without current limit on the LEDs). I made some changes to the playlist, connect back to the old power supply and Led strip, everything was normal as before. I will change the led’s to GPIO2 just in case
Strange but solved
I recently had a problem with ESP8266 crashing right after WiFi connect (or even when it didn’t manage to connect). It turned out to be poor soldering on the pullup resistors on the critical pins (GPIO0,2, and EN).
