Hello, I have a problem with the LED strips wherein my led is flickering random colors. I’m using raspberry pi 4b 4gb ram as my microcontroller and 150 led nodes of ws2812b with its own external power of 5v
Wires that are connected to rpi are
Gpio12 for DIN
Ground for LED
Ground from LED to -External Power
VCC from LED to +External Power
Here is the video clip
Hi Jayvie.
What current capability does your 5V LED supply have.
Cheers Bob
Oh Geez that’s a lotta wires. It seems to display the colour you want most of the time.
I’m just guessing here, but could signalling issues be causing the flickers?
Maybe noise from the signal wires are causing errors in the digital signal to the LED driver, leading to misread values. Causing occasional flickers.
You would need to measure the signals on the oscilloscope to confirm that.
Welcome Jayvie!!
Grounding looks alright- as its not flickering too much, try to remove the connection from the breadboard so it goes from the Pi > LED strip directly.
Are you able to look into how the code works? I’d also try unspooling the strip as the temperature can build up quickly inside.
About signaling, I tried doing the manual inputting of RGB colors through the code and I even tried running with less nodes but the issue is still the same
It works! I never tried connecting the ground directly to the raspberry pi and it never came to my mind. Thank you so much! Now I can run my LED with no flickering and no issues… I did look into my code cause I’m experimenting some effects to be included on our mobile application still I’m so thankful…
Congrats!
Great to hear that things work now.
Definitely make sure all the grounds are the same for the entire circuit.
Hi Jayvie
The 5V is 5 volts (Voltage) and the 2A is 2 amperes (current).
This should be enough to operate your string of 150 LEDs but might be straining things to run 2 strings so if you expand your set up don’t be too surprised if the power supply struggles a bit.
Cheers Bob
Hi Jayvie,
Glad to hear you found the problem! You certainly won’t be the last person to have ground issues with WS2812 LEDs, I’ve had problems myself before with a costume that had too long ground leads causing a ground loop.
The general rule of thumb is minimise wire lengths where possible and tie all ground connections back to a single point.
Thanks @MengLinMaker, @Liam120347, and @Robert93820 for your other pearls of wisdom that had everything on track to discovering the culprit.
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