The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning

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The New Hotness

  • Cheap WS2812 LEDs: Test Fixture Failure 1

    Well, that didn’t take long:

    WS2812 array - failure 1
    WS2812 array – failure 1

    The red spot in the next-to-bottom row of the test fixture (*) marks a failed WS2812 LED. All of the LEDs above it, plus the LED just to its left, are in pinball panic mode: random colors flicker across the panel as the LED’s controller transmits garbled data and the downstream LEDs pass it on.

    This failure provides several bits of information:

    • The LED sees the same power supply as all the rest, so it’s not a power thing
    • The LED gets data from the adjacent WS2812, so it’s not an Arduino output thing
    • It failed after about four days = 100 hours of continuous operation

    I connected the previous LED’s output (#6) to the next one’s input (#8), so the failed LED (#7, now with output disconnected) continues to flicker, but doesn’t influence any of the downstream LEDs.

    (*) The LEDs are daisy-chained from lower right to upper left, row by row, so that’s LED #7 of 28.