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psieg / Lightpack

Lightpack and Prismatik open repository
GNU General Public License v3.0
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Leds turn off completely after some random time #465

Open J4rt opened 3 years ago

J4rt commented 3 years ago

I have an Arduino based Aliexpress box I bought some weeks ago. During the first 2 weeks everything was working just fine. Last week leds started to turn off completely after some random time (seconds, minutes.....)

Issue does not seem to be related with the "send data only if colors changed" option. Having it activated or deactivated does not avoid the leds to turn off randomly.

When the leds turn off, clicking on "Turn lights ON" does not bring the lights back. However closing the program and opening it again turns the leds back on.

I have also observed that setting the "Over-Brightening" value to 0 makes the lights last longer (15-20 minutes) than setting the value to 80-100 (1-2 minutes).

I have experienced the issue with all the Prismatik releases I have installed including the last one. But using Ambibox then everything works fine: leds are on for hours regardless any setting. What a shame that Ambibox and other programs don’t perform as well as Prismatik though....

Please find below the log of the last time I had Prismatik running and then the leds turned off. Any ideas to help me fix this problem would be greatly appreciated.

Prismatik.0.log

zomfg commented 3 years ago

try setting grab interval to 100

J4rt commented 3 years ago

Tried but didn't work. Also tried what you mentioned here but the issue still occurs. Any other ideas of what could be the problem?

zomfg commented 3 years ago

is it dying just as fast at 100? try limiting prismatik to like 20 leds

J4rt commented 3 years ago

Unfortunately a 100ms grab interval didn't make it any better.

Reducing the number of leds worked though. Tested with 20, 40 and 80 and lights were on for a long time, but with 100 leds they turned off again quickly. I have 300 leds in total, so having to use only a few to make this software work is really a shame, especially when Ambibox holds the 300 leds perfectly.

Any other ideas why Prismatik is only working with a reduced number of leds in my setup?

Is there any tweaks or adjustments I could do to make it work?

zomfg commented 3 years ago

my guess is your serial chokes, 300 leds is a lot for 115200 baudrate, look here https://www.partsnotincluded.com/calculating-adalight-framerate-limits/ ambibox might be juuust slow enough for it to work (but I don't know what kind of framerate you are getting with it) so you'd want to find the highest baudrate that works for your board without causing artifacts (and if it's still low compared to your target, also adjust your grab interval too) and just changing it in pc software might not be enough, you might need to reflash your board for each baudrate you test (so you'd have the same on both sides)

J4rt commented 3 years ago

Interesting article and theory. However, this does not explain why Prismatik worked fine for the first weeks and then started failing. Something must have happened in the meantime that I dont know, with my hardware, windows (or both) that ruined it.

With Ambibox I get 12/15 fps with 115200 bauds and 300 leds, and lights are on for hours. With Prismatik I get about the same framerate with a 100ms grab interval, but then leds turn off suddenly after some seconds/minutes. It is very frustrating because I love the software and performs really great, if I just knew what broke it after the first weeks and could roll-back to the previous state I would be the happiest man on earth...

alexandergre commented 3 years ago

I am also experiencing a similar issue and have the same device as @J4rt, in my case it also happens randomly but with a slight twist: it only happens when the image on screen is very bright (almost completely white). The LEDs are stuck colored white for a minute or two, and then turn off. Like @J4rt mentioned, turning lights off and on does not fix the issue, but restarting the app does (have to wait until the LEDs turn off though), hence I think this could be a bug. I have also noticed that reducing the Brightness cap helps a bit, it seems it happens less often when it is reduced a bit (95-90%), have not tried lower values though.

zomfg commented 3 years ago

is your power supply good enough?..

alexandergre commented 3 years ago

I have 60w power supply, according to the online calculator the power draw for my setup is about 40w, so it should be ok.

zomfg commented 3 years ago

and if you limit prismatik to like 50 leds?

alexandergre commented 3 years ago

and if you limit prismatik to like 50 leds?

I'll give it a shot, but I just found out that Configuration wizard is not working anymore, opened https://github.com/psieg/Lightpack/issues/469

BTW, seems that changing brightness cap was a red herring, LEDs still stop working at random times.

davidko5 commented 1 year ago

Also had that issue( 8 led line, no screen grabbing, just static color, turning off randomly). Increasing SerialTimeout variable value from 60 to 1000 helped. I'm talking about variable in arduino code. Of course that's not the solution, just a workaround, but it works.