Help! 4x25 LED - Colorswirl works but adalight doesn't

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seminole21
 
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Help! 4x25 LED - Colorswirl works but adalight doesn't

Post by seminole21 »

I purchased the following from Adafruit this week:

4 strands of 12mm RGB LED Bullet pixels (strands of 25)
Arduino Uno R3
5v 10A switching power supply
Female DC power adapter

I got everything hooked up on the back of my TV. I have the ground connected to the Aruino and the Green and Yellow wires in the appropriate pins. From there, I connected all four LED strands together and connected the power supply to the last strand.

I ran the setup without any hiccups (Arduino IDE and Processing IDE). I was able to successfully run the colorswirl program and have the colors swirl around all four light strands (after I changed the colorswirl code from 25 LEDS to 100 LEDS). However, when I try and run adalight from the sketchbook, all four strands light up in various colors for a brief second, and then when it goes to run the adalight program, it only captures (reads) one strand. I'm not sure what's causing this, because all of the light initially light up in the adalight program, but then after the initial blink it only reads one strand. Also, with the colorswirl program working just fine, I am led to believe that the connections are correct and that enough power is getting to all of the lights.

Can anyone help me with this problem? I've been reading online for a solution for hours and have yet to find a definitive answer. Could it be the coding in the adalight program?

(Side note) - I did have to change the code in the colorswirl program to reflect 100 LEDS, because at first it was only reading 25, due to the code. I didn't see an option in the code for the adafruit program to change the number of lights from 25 to 100. I'm hoping it's something as simple as this.

Lastly, after everything was taped to my TV, I did notice that one of the strands of lights didn't have a red power wire coming out of it.... it only had the blue. This didn't seem to be a problem because I've been seeing flashing colors with adalight and the swirl works in colorswirl.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. I'm 15+ hours into setting this up and it's getting a tad frustrating.

Thanks so much in advance!

seminole21
 
Posts: 2
Joined: Sat Oct 05, 2013 6:10 pm

Re: Help! 4x25 LED - Colorswirl works but adalight doesn't

Post by seminole21 »

*****CORRECTION*******

Now colorswirl only swirls with one strand and only one strand is working with adalight.

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adafruit_support_rick
 
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Re: Help! 4x25 LED - Colorswirl works but adalight doesn't

Post by adafruit_support_rick »

Please post some pictures showing how you have everything hooked up.

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pburgess
 
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Re: Help! 4x25 LED - Colorswirl works but adalight doesn't

Post by pburgess »

Hi there, I apologize for overlooking this one before...

Regarding the Adalight software and the number of LEDs: this is discussed on the "Advanced Topics" page of the Adalight tutorial. It's not a simple matter of changing a number; because every setup may be physically arranged differently, there's a whole process you have to go through for telling the software the position of each pixel.

As for the only-one-strand-working: this usually indicates either a bad pixel or a disconnected wire along the chain; anything downstream will be affected. Diagnosing this is typically a divide-and-conquer affair: test each strand alone, as the only item in the chain. If one fails to light up, there's your culprit. If they each light up, then try each of the three remaining strands (one at a time) chained after the first. If all three fail, either the output of the first strand is broken somehow (in which case swap it out for one of the others, then repeat the chain test with the remaining ones), or you need to double-check that colorswirl is set up for more than 25 pixels. When you have two working strands, test each of the remaining two in the third position, and so forth. If it comes down to a bad strand (or multiple), we'll get that replaced.

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