What Am I doing wrong? 4x strips and ESP32 ETH-01

Issues
1

Hi All!

I am making a Neopixel strip tube using 4 strips of 206 WS2812b LEDs.

I have an ESP32-ETH01 V1.4 supplied from Ebay - Obviously the ethernet interface takes a lot of pins. Purchase link here: ESP32 WT32-ETH01 Embedded Serial Port Ethernet WIFI Bluetooth Development Boards | eBay

Data pins are connected to IO2, IO4, IO12, IO14, which are connected via a level shifter.

I am also using an INMP441 mic for sound reactivity although I have this disconnected until I sort this issue out. - When connected, it will go from |IO15|SCK| , |IO3|WS| |IO0|SD|

I have tried the Level shifters out, switched the MCUS out - as well as the veroboard. (I have 4 of these to make so plenty of spares) Also I have tried various versions of WLED ethernet.

I’m a bit new to the ESP32, but I have had a decent amount of experience with Arduino.

I HAVE had this fully working on its own but it was about a couple of months ago - I don’t remember what the conditions were exactly when I did. Now what I am getting, is that occasionally I will have one or two LEDs light up on their own. I have managed to illuminate a couple of strips, but they were completely white, not responding to colour input.

I can access the WLED dashboard over wifi though this has been patchy.

Am I missing something? Pull up/pull down resistors? caps? I have checked everywhere for shorts as well and found none. Whatever error I have is consistent across all of my boards

Not sure where to start really so any help would be appreciated! Sorry if I am being a little vague but these issues are all pretty inconsistent despite swapping multiple parts. Thank you.

2

without any details, I’d say its your wiring, powersupply or wrong/missing levelshifter.

3

Hi dedehai, thank you for your reply!

I will try and rule out the power supply next, I hadn’t thought of that. Level shifter is fine in theory and I’ve tried a couple of them in case one had blown.

Like I said, I had this working before, but not on this veroboard I have made for it. I had a similar process of odd lights not displaying correctly before I figured it out, but I just don’t remember what I did

When you say ‘without any details’ do you mean there are some details i should be including here?

4

you obviously built something around that board. its like buying a motor and asking why your car does not run without sayng what you build around that engine.

5

I don’t really understand what you are saying, but thank you for taking your time to reply nonetheless.

I did swap out the power supplies and noticed no difference. They are TDK Lamda 20A 5V power supplies, so arguably decent quality and enough to drive these LEDs on paper.

My description more or less sums up what I have built, if there is any specific detail you could use to help me, I will do my best to show you. Thank you

6

a wiring diagram.

7

Here’s a wiring diagram

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If it looks overly simplistic its because it is literally that simple. I’ve left the microphone out because I’m not connecting it till I’ve sorted this out

And yes I know the level shifter is wired wrong on the diagram, but only because fritzing has the bottom half the wrong way round for some reason and I didn’t want to wrap wires around the diagram. Obviously the low side is wired to all the ESP32 outputs, and all the high sides are the LED strip

8

that looks about right. any fotos showing the complete wiring?

9

You still haven’t listed the actual parts you’re using, e.g. what exact levelshifter? That labeling suggests an I2C shifter that is clearly marked in the docs as “do not use”.

IO0 is the ethernet clock so you can’t use that if you want to use ethernet.

10

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Thank you for replies!

Here are some pictures of the board. Its housed within a polycarbonate tube, Hence the 3-D printed tubular enclosure. The level shifter goes in the black pins direcctly below the ESP32, the 6 pin JST socket are the data lines to the LED strip (two pins aren’t used), the 6 pin JST to the right of that is for the microphone, and the 5 pin JST above that is for power and FTDI/USB connection. The little two pin header is for putting in when I flash it.

The level shifters are some kind of off-brand things that I’ve had in a box for years. I would assume they probably are I2C level shifters, so first thing I will do is switch to the recommended ones - A lot of tutorials I’ve seen use I2C ones without incident, but I guess the quality of them fluctuates quite wildly. Another note with these level shifters, is that I don’t seem to be able to flash the board when the level shifter is connected.

As for the microphone, I guessed as much. I will likely leave it out as there don’t seem to be enough pins free. I will see if there is some software-based solution for this

And yes that particular ESP32 board is as F*d as the picture suggests, I’ve just kept it to design the enclosure - obviously I’m testing with the ones I have that are working.

11

Since you have equipment you can try modding the i2c shifter reducing the high side pull up resistor to about 1K, should be around 10 by default. That useually gets them working well enough.

12

Okay… I have been INCREDIBLY dumb…

Basically I have a custom busbar at the top where there are two positive terminals and two negative terminals, which are on opposing faces of an aluminium tube. I hadn’t wired the opposing sides together, so I was getting 2.5 volts in places, which really confused me. It visually looked okay to me because there were a lot of wires on the terminals, because I was using external wiring to power it, but was missing the little leads that join the busbars together. How the MCU and power supply survived a glitch like that, I don’t know…

I now have it working although I will still say it is a bit intermittent and unreliable. Sometimes I can blame connectors, sometimes playing around with level shifters makes it wake up again.

I actually modded a I2C shifter, which seems to be a tad more reliable, but either way I have ordered the recommended one, to reduce issues. So thank you for that kilrah. Just to note, I put the modded level shifter in BEFORE i noticed the aforementioned power wiring issue, and it actually got some of the strips working despite that.

Another thing I notice which is probably to do with using a more recent version of WLED is that apparently Pin 14 is now forbidden to use as a LED data pin - I didn’t get this warning before, so I am going to switch that around.

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My next issue is Ethernet. I can’t seem to connect to WLED over ethernet, only over wi-fi via a router or the ESP in Access point mode.

According to the diagram from github for ESP32-ETH01 (no version number specified), ethernet seems to occupy the Expected pins 21, 22, 19, 25, 26 and 27
and also pins 23,18, 13 and 0… Pin 13 seems to be the anomaly here as I cannot find options on the list of ethernet devices in WLED that match up according to the table on this last page here. https://kno.wled.ge/features/ethernet-lan/

I am guessing that its most likely that this cheap integrated ETH01 just isn’t compatible with WLED, in which case i will just ditch the ethernet capability

The other thing I’m guessing is that I’ve fried something somewhere, so tomorrow I will be testing with as yet unused hardware to get my control variable back so to speak.

13

Huh? There’s a setting just for it in the ethernet modes. You need to select it and power cycle for Ethernet to work.

14

I tried that. didn’t work, So I tried selecting some from the list of available ethernet types. Power cycling between all of course.

15

It works fine with the WT32-ETH01 ethernet setting, got multiple of them running.

16

I’ve tried that one, and just not seeing anything. I have managed to have it work over wi-fi (same router) so I don’t imagine the network configuration is particularly problematic,

I’ve tried disabling wi-fi on the router AND the ESP and nothing has gotten ethernet to work yet.

17

Do you at least get link/activity leds on the port? should tell you if it’s network config.

18

I do… I have a solid green light and flickering orange light. Annoyingly, I have no other networking hardware available to test this out any time soon, so I can’t rule out the router at this stage… I’m using an old TalkTalk router (made by sagemcom) that works with anything else thats plugged into it.

As well as this, I now seem to have issues flashing any of my controllers using the web installer. Not sure if its my computer, browser, chip or USB-TTL thingimabob or anything else, but I’m running out of time to get this going.

I’m going to try looking at one of the more basic, recommended ESP32s without ethernet from a reputable supplier instead of chinese stuff on amazon with no supplier issued datasheets. And if you have tips for suppliers, much appreciated, but bear in mind I am in the UK.

19

If they’re blinking it should be fine hardware wise so probably setup, maybe you’re not getting an IP, try setting a static one (don’t forget the gateway). Or just keep using it on wifi like you would with another board.

20

Okay so I had not set a gateway before when setting a static IP of 192.168.1.104, but I have usually tried it without setting a static IP at all, with no luck either way.

I set the gateway to 192.168.1.1 and left the subnet mask at 255.255.255.0

Bear in mind I can usually get it to work connected to the same router via wifi

Also… thank you for the ongoing help once again.