I've rebuilt the Project Piano LED Visualizer but I'm experiencing some issues with the LED strip that I don't understand.
I'm using a 10A/5V power supply to power a strip of precisely 180 WS2812B LEDs while powering the Pi-Zero seperately with an "adequate phone charger".
simulate this circuit – Schematic created using CircuitLab
At first, I used 0,3mm solid Wire for GND and the PWM-pin, which worked fine, the LEDs lit up and everything was good. Until the wire broke, because it was quite fiddly and bound to break given the necessity of mounting the project to a Piano.
So I changed the wiring to a 0,5mm stranded wire, which is more flexible and thus made positioning and such way more easy. I also made it a bit longer to better position the pi, so the wire has about 30-45cm of total length (more guesswork as I'm currently not there to check)
However, when hooking everything up, the played notes lit up correctly with an "extra LED" along with slight flickering. Before only a single LED lit up as it should.
The problem appears to be worse when white-color is used then when a single color is used.
The functionality still was ok, but the glitchy behaviour was odd and also not constant on every note played. That randomness also makes it a bit distracting.
I was wondering...
- ..does this come from the stranded Wire?
- ..is there some other error in the setup, that's been overlooked in the project?
- ..is it the length of the new Wire?
- ..is it a problem in the programming?
I should mention that this project includes a HAT for controlling the strip: