Glitching

[twuelfing]

Ok, first off this is a homemade “Gameframe”. I am sure I have caused this glitch.

I suspected a shoddy ground, but that wasn’t it.
Any tips what may cause a behavior like seen in the attached video?

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[Jeremy Williams]

Does that animation always distort on the same frame(s)? If so, looks like a SD read error. I’d try reformatting or using another microSD card.

[twuelfing]

from reading on the forums i suspected the SD may be the culprit, i reformatted the card and copied over the data again.
it doesn’t happen on the same frame every time, it seems random, but quite frequent.

I could try a different SD card. I got a quite cheap one, my assumption was the read and write speeds don’t need to be anything super fast, but this one was brand new this morning.

perhaps there is an issue with the micro SD board. I will see about getting my hands on another one of those as well, then i should be able to test with a new SD board and a new card.
perhaps I have a damaged neo-pixel somewhere, but it seems to affect the LEDs closer to the signal start more frequently than the ones at the end of the string. Perhaps this logic doesn’t actually apply.

thanks!

[twuelfing]

I should have mentioned this artifact even occurs when loading the gameframe logo.
i will try to get a longer video up on youtube and link here later tonight.

also, just rand the strand test adafruit example program, all seems well with the neopixels. (whew)

tested the RTC, that responded
tested the SD card, that worked

[twuelfing]

Here is a longer video
Longer video

Also, I just thought of something, I dont have the status LED, or IR receiver on their respective pins, could that have have some floating logic that would interfere with it the code in this way? Perhaps that is rhetorical, I will try hooking them up tomorrow morning and see if that has any impact.

[twuelfing]

a thought,
could the IR code be interfering with the timing of the Neopixels and shifting the signal enough to do something like this?

[Jeremy Williams]

Yep, that’s strange! I would certainly try another microSD card just to rule that out. And double check your wiring — you’re using a level shifter for the clock & data lines? You could try adding Fastled.show(); to the top of loop and see if it persists identically. if it does, that would point to an SD read error. If not, it would point to an LED error.

[twuelfing]

well, no level shifter, the SD reader and RTC both say they are 3v and 5v compatible, perhaps i should run them off the line that supplies the LED strip at 5v and get the power draw off the Teensy.
I will pickup an extra microSD tomorrow and test that as well..
i commented out all the calls to read IR, and anecdotally it seems to have helped, but the issue persists but seemingly diminished. I actually dont even have the include file for the IR called any more just to be sure. Silly neopixels concern me with the timing requirements.

of note: the issue never appears when in the setup menu, but does occur when the logo loads.

I will continue to troubleshoot.
I cant tell you how much I appreciate the help.

[Jeremy Williams]

Sorry for my absence. The level shifter is for the LEDs — and in the case of NeoPixels, it’s only for the data line (sorry I said clock and data). See here…

http://tinyurl.com/zmwhkoo

If you’re using a Teensy LC it has a level shifter built in for this exact purpose on the bottom row. It’s the pin that says “17 at VIN voltage.”

https://www.pjrc.com/teensy/teensyLC.html

I don’t know if this is the cause of your problem but it could be, and you’ll want to run the data through a level shifter to avoid problems regardless.

[twuelfing]

No worries, I am traveling now so I likely won’t get to testing this for a few weeks.
This is great info.

[bvanasselt]

Just curious if you ever got this worked out. I’m having what appears to be the exact same issue on my custom GameFrame. Looks very similar to your video — happens occasionally on startup screen, consistently when moving through animations, but does not happen during testing (like when you hold down both buttons on bootup).

I’m using the V2 code modified to work with ws2812b lights.

Troubleshooting so far:

I’ve run it on Teensy 3.2 (with breakout SD reader from Adafruit) and Teensy 3.6 (using integrated SD Card reader), and I’ve loaded the images onto two separate SD cards. I’ve also run it on both the pre-assembled 16×16 grid, like the one used in the original GameFrame (i’m using this as a prototype) and on a larger, custom-built one with individual ws2812b lights individually soldered. I can’t say the glitches are identical in each build case, but very similar – they happen every few seconds (on average, timing doesn’t seem to be predictable), and it seems to happen more frequently with higher speed (higher framerate) animations.

Finally, I’ve used the same physical setups (lights, wiring, controllers) to run other test projects, and never experienced the same issue.

I’m left thinking that it must be some other compatibility setting in the V2 code with the ws2812b light instead of the lights Jeremy used in the V2 frame.

Any ideas?

Thanks in advance!

[bvanasselt]

Quick update: last night I installed the original GameFrame sketch onto an Uno and tested the same hardware and wiring – worked perfectly. Same SD card, card reader, wiring, lights and other components. So I’m now more confident that the problem I’m having is related to running the V2 code with the ws2812 lights (or possibly related to running a teensy 3.2 or 3.6 rather than the LC).

I don’t understand the differences between FastLED and Adafruit’s neopixel library well enough to troubleshoot the code, but I did notice that the V1 code buffers 1 pixel (3 leds) whereas the v2 code buffers 16.

Jeremy, do you happen to recall, did you use the smaller buffer with v1 because of a hardware limitation in the Uno or was it related to the ws2812 lights themselves? It’s probably unrelated to my problem, but I’ll mess with this tonight and see if it helps the glitching problem.

Any other ideas are welcome.

[twuelfing]

Sorry for the delayed response. I am getting ready to move out of the country to start a new job and have not solved the issue on my homebrew game frame. I am not sure when I will get back to it, but I am sure I will at some point. Sorry I cant be of more help at the moment.

[bvanasselt]

No problem. Thanks for the response. Best of luck with your move. I’ll post back if I get it figured out.

In case anyone else has ideas, I should mention that I was using the level shifter with the Teensies, but not with the Uno, as it already has 5v data out.

[avs.stolyarov]

Hello! I did upgrade my Frame v1 to v2 And I also noticed a similar problem. I tried to install the shifter register, but the problem remained. 🙁

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