Home Automation Hangout 2021-02-07: Testing, testing 123, is this thing on?

places [Music] [Music] good morning superhumans um before i get into anything else i acknowledge the traditional owners of this land i pay my respects to their elders past and present and to aboriginal elders and peoples from other communities who may be taking part in this live stream today so livestream hopefully this is working looks like we're alive um interesting comment question already from daniel watson okay so there are a whole lot of the um of the regulars here today uh good morning to johnny frank dodgy henrik um who else have we got here mitchell uh oh andy g'day andy austin's creations as well yes i am live we have not yet broken the internet now um i okay so i was not really feeling like live streaming today uh just on a slight personal note before we get into other things it's been a um a bit of a rough week my daughter's cat had to be put down a couple of days ago very unexpectedly and she was she seemed to be fine and then her stomach became a bit bloated up took her to the vet and they did an ultrasound and discovered that she had a very large cancer and so we had to have her put down and my this cat has been my daughter's best friend since she was about nine years old so she's been understandably super upset um so it hasn't been a very fun week and i heard on i saw on discord there were i can't remember who it was someone said that they'd had um they'd had to have their dog put down a week or so ago as well so uh yes i know we're not the only one that goes through this sort of thing but it's not fun when it happens very very sad so um i got up this morning and did not have a whole lot of motivation to do a live stream but this is exactly when we need our friends isn't it so i get to hang out and talk to you which is really cool so thank you for coming along to the um to the live stream what else okay so well you can probably see um yeah thanks joey and jose um frank yeah so it was um it was frank who was talking about that on discord a couple of things you can probably see right there there is a toaster sitting on the bench and beside that just there there's a box that's got a two year uh controlled rgb led strip in it and um the reason i've got a toaster sitting on my bench is that i've been doing more of the two-year video and i've just been using that as a prop i brought it out this morning grabbed it out of the kitchen and i did a little bit of filming this morning actually before the live stream so i really want to get that video out um but i'll get there all right um the other thing if i move my head and you can see the everything's which way that way okay the super house sign james kennewell's amazing sign is up there and the other thing i was doing this morning was just trying to diagnose that flickering problem and i'm i keep going backwards and forwards between it being a software problem and a hardware problem it only does that when i turn the brightness right down and i'm just going to switch to rgb taster mod yes where where can i find i think i minimized that window i was just going to look for the here it is the wled interface window so i'm going to bring this over and switch to my desktop view so you can see what i'm looking at so you can see over my shoulder if i move my head that way you can see the sign and you can see the wled control panel here and you can see i've got the brightness turned right down now if i turn the brightness up and let it do its update you can see that there's no more flickering it's just smooth well if i bring it right up here it'll be fine see it's all nice but the thing is that the brightness there is so high that the camera can't actually make it out properly it just ends up like a big blur so what i want to do is bring the brightness right down so that the camera can actually make out the individual letters and you can see that what happens is on the right hand side it starts doing that crazy flickering now i've pulled the back off it and looked at the power supply setup and that all seems fine i've measured the supply rails and it's getting a nice clean five volts there's no brown out issues and also the thing is that this happens when the brightness is turned down not when it's turned up so i removed the voltage regulator modules from the back all except one and isolated that section and made sure that it's getting the current it needs the voltage is perfect so i don't think it's a power supply issue and if you look in the interface here you can see that there are these segments set up in wled so we've got segment i'll spin them all down and you can see that there is a segment from 0 to 161 which is segment 0. that's a special case segment in wled and then segment 1 is 214 to 234 we've got 161 to 214 and 234 to 385. now there are some weirdnesses about this because the segments are not meant to overlap so you can see that segment 1 ends at led 234 and segment 3 starts at led 234 and so that really should be led 235 but when i um change things in here it keep for some reason the setting in wled keeps reverting back to what it was before i've done things like resetting all the segments and somehow they magically just come back to this setting with overlapping numbers and according to the wled docs you're not meant to have the numbers overlapping so my next step is i think to um to do a clean upload i'm just going to take the current release binary of wled reflash it onto the um the d1 mini that is running this and start with a totally clean in software installation and then define the um maybe have no segments to start with now the reason that this is set up with segments is that the sign is actually in three parts and you know i'm facing squirrels but this is a fun squirrel and it's shiny so [Music] let's chase it for a moment now the way that sign is actually made is that it's three pcbs and let's um let's have a look at them and marvel at how many leds there are in here and how tight they are so what do we got eagle archive so i grabbed the design for this is actually up on james's github account so where is it s s for super house what have i got uh super i can't read very well what is going on maybe where is it super house logo pcbs there it is okay so it's divided into three sections so we've got super word board let's open that one up and check this out look at all these leds now there are a couple of layers here i might turn off just to make it a little bit um get rid of the restrict layers and keep out layers what else is there that's uh bitmap yeah okay there are some bmp layers in there so we'll turn those off just so we can see what's going on so you can see that this pcb says the word super and it is just a very long string of leds and in fact funny thing is if we go to the schematic look at this it's just leds one into another all the way along keeps going and going and going and going so yeah you can see that the data is um let's have a look at the oops let's have a look at the way this is laid out it's a classic rgb led string so we've got a ground connection like common ground to everything we've got a common supply to everything and then data out from what each segment comes along goes into data in on the next one and then data out from this one goes to data in on the next one and that is how ws 2812 leds are connected it's it's basically they're the data lines are all in series data out from one goes to that into the next so and when you have a lot of leds you get a bit of a crazy schematic so that is in fact hang on let's look over here so we've got this is on the um the design manager led one scrolling down down down down down and let's sort by name scrolling down 160. so there are 160 leds in the word super just there which is a lot of leds and this would have been fun to put together by hand i i don't envy james having done that so back to here anyway we've got this super pcb so what you can see is we've got right here signal in this is where data comes in from the ws28 no not from that from the d sorry from the d1 mini so this is led one right here and then we've got the ground connection because the whole top of the pcb is a ground plane and the whole bottom of the pcb is a 5 volt plane so what you can see is the 5 volt connection from to that led is going through a via or a via i need to start saying via because every time i say via people laugh at me um so but i learned that word from books so that's why i pronounce it via um so power comes from the far side of the board so each of these leds has its connection to the ground plane it's got its connection from the other side of the board for power data comes in here signal in and then data out from this led goes to data in on the next led and then out from that one to in on the next and out from that line to in on the next and so on all the way around the board and so it starts there and it loops there and then comes up there and back around and all over the place so it's a whole lot of leds to put on the board and if we come back to here so the next board in the series is the logo board yes i want to load it and similar thing so you can see here the power connections and because one side of the pcb is ground and the other side is 5 volts it doesn't actually need tracks to go anywhere there is a a pad here which is ground and that just connects to one of the copper pores and there's another pad there which is five volts which connects to the other so it looks like they're not connected to anything but in fact they are and if i um if i run a rat's nest we can see that the ground is connected to the top side of the pcb and the five volts is connected to the bottom side of the pcb so i'll rip that back up again and so we have that central pcb which has the logo in it same deal as before so because this pcb is is the middle of the three it has the data in coming in from this side so this is the input coming in and then once it goes all the way around the loop so you can see the loop starts here goes around goes around the entire thing and then the last led in the chain i think is this one and that out so that's the data out which comes all the way across the board and it comes up to this pad right here which is the data out to chain into the next of the pcbs so if you apply power to this and you put data into here you got yourself an rgb led string and data coming back out here so they can be daisy chained together so you could get a few of these pcbs if you wanted to and just daisy chain them all and treat it as a single long string of leds excuse me uh house word board that's just it's the same thing but let's just look at this last one so we've got data coming in to the word house now this is the uh the board where the weird stuff is going on and uh if we go back to here so you can see it you can see super and the logo are working perfectly and the it's the house board where all the flickering is happening and so you can see for example well you can see there's data coming in here same deal and it ends is there a data set a data out is that d out i think it is okay cool so d out is broken out here even though it doesn't go anywhere because this is the last word the output from that led comes out and it's broken out so there'd just be no connection to that i hadn't even noticed that before but you could chain this together with another one they're all just long led strips same deal we've got five volts and ground connected to the pcb wrong screen just staring at me you should be staring at this okay this is what i was just trying to show you so this is the end of the word house and you can see the data output coming from here going to a pad so you could connect more rgb leds to that if you wanted to just make it part of the string so you can see the power here top and bottom of the pcb as before and you can see a couple of other things so there's a power connection here which just goes to the same uh thing so electrically that five volt connection and that five volt connection and this five volt connection and in fact that one and that one they're all the same they all just go to the uh the back of the pcb where the the five volt plane is so you could connect to any of them and in fact the way that sign is set up there are multiple voltage regulators and it's feeding into different connection points and that's just to make sure that there is enough capacity in the voltage regulators so [Music] excuse me hang on a second does mute work mute that's better clearing the throat all right so when what am i looking at lost my train of thought i'm not really with it today all right so lots of leds and what i've noticed is that the um the flickering seems to occur well the position where it occurs moves and if you look at this board the end of the led chain is on the right the start of the led chain is on the left and the lower i turn the brightness the more the flickering progresses across from the right towards the left if i turn the brightness up a little bit the flickering starts further and further along it gets closer and closer to the end of the chain and if i turn the brightness down the flickering moves across from the right hand edge and is yeah comes almost all the way across to the start of the h very weird behavior i don't understand it and the thing is that it works perfectly if i have the brightness turned up so if i come up here i'll just turn the brightness up move my head out of the way and as you can see the flickering has gone away it's perfect it's nice and smooth exactly the way it should be but if i click on here turn the brightness down a bit so you can it's flickering just towards the end of the word house and if i turn it down a bit more the flickering progresses further across the word and the lower i turn it down the worse the flickering is odd odd i don't get it anyway yeah andy suggested putting an oscilloscope on the data lines on the third block of leds check signal quality and test sending the same set of data bits continuously yeah so one thing that i thought of doing is isolating each of these segments because the pcbs it's three pcbs butted up against each other end to end and then there's just a little jumper wire so the output of the the chain from the logo comes into the input of the chain to the word house so it's trivial from the back of the sign to simply remove that jumper and then feed data directly into it so one thing that i was thinking of doing is basically doing that i'll just separate the three segments i'll take the data from the d1 mini and send it straight into the word house and just run the house segment totally isolated from anything else oh i just thought of something else that would be really interesting to try this this would help nail down whether it is a hardware problem or a software problem and that is to change the order of the panels the reason is that we've got three hundred and was i went about 385 leds now if it is a software problem if i take the the data from the d1 mini and send it into the word house and then take the output of house and send it into super and then from super into the logo now if the problem changes so that it's the logo that starts doing the flickering then i think it's probably a software problem but if the flickering occurs still in the same position it's probably an electrical problem anyway uh but yes andy you're right i could stick an oscilloscope on it and uh see the um and see the the signal uh so matt just said add scope test points on the pcb yeah at the moment there aren't any test points but there are points where i could test if that makes sense so looking at this pcb for example most of the links the data in data outlinks are just on the top of the pcb and they pass under the leds like under the body of the leds or wherever like you know it just goes from one to the next and i can't get to the front of the pcb it's all glued together so the only thing i can do is look at the back of the pcb but there are a few places like here for example you can see that the data connection coming out of one led so d out here has to duck under a track so it goes down a via goes along the back of the pcb and comes back up a via and what that means is that anywhere that happens i can access that on the back of the pcb and then i can use that as a test point so these these little vias just here are exposed on the back the the solder mask doesn't cover them and even if it did i could always just scrape solder mask off so anywhere that the these little data lines jump around the back of the pcb like here there are a few of them i can get probes onto the back of that so i can access all of these points and do testing so i could do things like inject data directly at that point if i wanted to if i really wanted to do some some testing what i could do for example is come partway along the chain like down here and i could cut this track on the back of the pcb with a scalpel and then inject data just into this led and from there into the rest of the chain and then later i could just solder a little uh strand of wire or solder bridge or something across there and reconnect that so each of those points become somewhere that i could segment i could break the segment and then deal with just a subsection of the string of leds so stephen w said the whole front side is flood-filled ground yes that's correct uh that might have been responding to someone else i have not been paying enough attention uh yeah um so our def pom said is probably still flickering but due to the timings of pwm and data transfer it will cause longer off times uh yes uh so oh and make a sa doesn't a long chain of leds need voltage injected part way too um it can do but that's actually taken care of on this the reason for doing that if you've got a very long chain of leds the current for the further leds on the chain have to pass along the chain and if you've got just regular led strip the um the conductors are fairly small so you end up starting to get you get voltage drops so what you do is run a parallel conductor down the strip and then you supply power down the strip further along so that you can you can avoid those voltage drops because what you can do is easily run much heavier wire than the thin trace that is on the led strip but in this particular case the entire pcb is a ground plane and also a 5 volt rail so there should be no problems at all with voltage drop the only possible problem would be if the power supply could not keep up with the current requirement of the leds and so you're getting voltage trooping but i've tested that that's not happening the voltage is staying rock solid on 5 volts and i've tested at multiple points across the pcb it's um it's 5 volts and the thing is that you can test that really easily pretty much anywhere because if we zoom in and look on here for example the 5 volts to this led goes through this via that goes to the far side of the pcb because the far side of the pcb is the 5 volt plane in fact now that it's highlighted you can see it everywhere so we've got little vias all over the place linking through to the far side of the pcb and every one of those i can easily access from the back of the pcb so i've put a multimeter on it and i've checked the voltage on many not all of them obviously but many of these points and it's rock solid it's just 5 volts spot on the money so anyway it's a um an interesting little thing to try to uh to solve uh okay so frederick said does the d1 mini have a level shifter to cut with the 5 volts of the ws2812 leds that is a great point and a very good catch in this case i don't think it does now this raises an interesting issue which is driving uh ws2812s or 13s or you know any of these addressable rgb leds from a 3.3 volt device and it's one of those things that is technically out of spec but usually it works and the thing is that as long as the first led works then you're fine because as um oh as mike said the signal level shouldn't be an issue because each led acts as a repeater and it's possible to um in fact let's this i can't remember where but somewhere just recently this came up as a as a question where was it i think it was on twitter someone was talking about level shifting and leds and i um i included something about this where was it it wasn't a talk i did a couple of years ago was it the donkey car electronics talk might have been this one and there so this was at the open hardware mini conf a couple of years ago come on keynote you can do it and yes this is where it was cool all right let's do a little impromptu presentation just for the fun of it uh okay awesome so this is one trick that you can use to make to make sure that you're driving a um a 5 volt led correctly from a 3.3 volt microcontroller like a d1 mini and so this is the standard setup and uh unfortunately i can't highlight nets on this because this is a screenshot in a presentation that's not actually eagle but you can see in this case gpio18 we've got a data line coming in here data into the first led and then we've got power here and we've got ground down here and then we've got data out it comes up and then data into the next led and so on and so forth and there is a diode next to knight diode a capacitor next to each one to provide a bit of power decoupling now that is actually an interesting point there are no capacitors as far as i could see on the uh on that sign and according to the you know the specs for the ws20x12b you're meant to have a capacitor on the supply line right next to every led i don't know that that would be related to this issue but it's possible maybe that's got something to do with it ah it doesn't explain why it happens just on that one part of the sign though okay so anyway back to what i was talking about so we've got data coming in here and the leds here are running at 5 volts now this is the issue so we've got 5 volts being supplied right here and that means that in order so the way logic levels are defined it's generally as a percentage of uh of the supply line so in this particular case for excuse me for the um the data input to the led to register as a logical high so 1 or whatever it has to be at least 0.7 times the supply voltage now because the supply voltage is 5 volts we need to drive this line up to 0.7 times 5 which is 3.5 volts for this to see a logical one but if we are running this off a d1 mini or some other you know any 3.3 volt microcontroller it's going to be driving a data level between 0 or close to 0 and close to 3.3 volts but 3.3 volts is not high enough to register according to the spec a logical one on this or a logical high whatever the encoding scheme is i don't even know what it is on ws2812 so long since i've looked at that i can't remember so um it might be like a grey encoding scheme or something i don't know it's probably just zero low is zero and high is one uh but i can't remember and uh so we've got data in i'm losing my train of thought here data in needs to be driven up to 3.5 volts according to the spec now the thing is that that is what the spec sheet says and the led is guaranteed to work if you drive it to 3.5 volts or higher on the data line that that's like the minimum threshold they guarantee every single led is going to work at 3.5 volts or higher but the thing is that there can be some variation in manufacturing and the actual level at which it uh it receives a one is probably lower than that and probably significantly lower than that so most of the time you can connect a 3.3 volt microcontroller to a ws2812b and if you're driving 3.3 volts or close to 3.3 volts on the data line the led will probably still work and now the interesting thing is that the way these leds chain together you can see data out from here going to data in on the next one because the the led actually has a little integrated circuit inside it and it is running at five volts it's got this five volt supply line so what it will do is drive the output line at the the proper specified voltage so the data out coming from this one will be at five volts so if you took this input for example and you drove it up to 3.6 volts so it's just over the threshold that it's guaranteed to work what happens is you've got 3.6 volts coming up on the data in you don't get 3.6 volts coming up on the output you get 5 volts because the driver chip inside here is directly driving the the data it's got basically you can think of it as being like a built-in buffer so as long as the first led in your chain sees valid data the rest of them are fine because each one of them buffers the data and drives its output to the to the correct levels so the question is we've got this problem so we've got we need to drive this input to 0.7 times vcc so here's the trick right here what you can do is put a diode in the supply line of just the first led so like a one in four one four eight or whatever it doesn't need to be much because the amount of current that is pulled um by just the first led is fairly minimal it's going to be uh i'm making up numbers off the top of my head here but leds typically will do up to about 20 milliamps so if you've got three of them so we've got red green and blue and we're driving them hard if you had them all turned on maximum you're talking about something in the region of 60 milliamps give or take you know it's around 60 milliamps running down into here so you don't need a big power diode or anything as long as you can it can handle 60 milliamps it's okay so what happens then though is that the diode provides a voltage drop so we're supplying five volts in and then the led a diode typically like a standard silicon diode has a 0.6 volt voltage drop and so what happens is you get 4.4 volts on the output of the diode and that is the supply voltage going to the first led okay so that means that the first led is running at 4.4 volts instead of 5 volts now running at 4.4 volts is just within spec for a ws2812 so that's okay it's going to run at 4.4 volts but what that means is that now our requirements are different on the data line so the data that comes into the led still has to be 0.7 times the supply voltage but now it's 4.4 volts which means we only need to drive it to 3.08 volts in order to be within spec and to definitively like have a logic high coming into that first led so what happens then is the first led is running at 4.4 volts and the the input data is within spec running off a 3.3 volt microcontroller and the output this is what i was getting at before i was jumping the gun the data outline here is being driven at 4.4 volts because um the chip in here is running at 4.4 volt so what we're getting is 4.4 volts coming out of the data outline going into the next led which is running at 5 volts and 4.4 volts is higher than 3.5 so it's not ambiguous and everything is happy so last thing this is the this is the little bit of magic so if you take a string of rgb leds and you separate the power line for the first led only not for the whole lot only for the first led you've got to isolate just that that 5 volt input to it run it through a diode then you're golden everything works the slight downside is that the first led will be very slightly not as bright as the rest so if you've got if you're doing this just with two leds so exactly as it is in this little schematic here we've got two leds and if you had those two leds near each other and you were driving them both the same you would notice that the first one is not quite as bright as the second one but in something like a a whole string of leds like you can see you know there and as we were saying excuse me and as we're saying here if for example that first led was not quite as bright as the rest you'd never notice because it's surrounded by all these other leds and it would be just fine all right i need to take a quick look at the at the chat what have i been missing uh oh make i said are they ws28 xx yes they are 2812 b's i believe um oh dodgy said if they aren't on the same pcb would they have the same ground plane uh in this case um oh that is a really interesting question um my immediate reaction to that was just going to be yes of course they are the same but no there is an interesting subtlety here because there are different voltage regulator modules now the the voltage regulator modules i think have a common ground through from the input to the output if they didn't you're right they would not have the same ground plane which would mean the data voltage may not be relative to the same thing because zero volts is not really zero volt everything is relative now quickly thinking through this without explaining myself i don't think that's a problem but this it did dodgy you actually raised a really interesting question there all right so let's dig into this just a little deeper all right so we've got five volt and ground here and the data voltage coming in up here is relative to ground now if all of these pcbs had ground connections jumpered from one to the next then yes you are right they would all have a common ground that is tied so a zero volt reference all right i should people get upset about the using the term ground versus zero volts or whatever so i'm going to say instead of saying ground i'm going to say zero volts just for the purposes of being pedantic but it's um because ground technically we are not at ground potential here what we're talking about is a zero volt reference and then five volts is relative to that zero volts now that zero volts could actually be at some higher voltage relative to ground or it could be at lower voltage as in true ground so imagine we had zero volts and five volts on these two connections and then we had two pcbs side by side and they were being fed by different power supplies they both have a zero volt and a five volt connection but their zero volts may not be the same they could be offset by some amount and that means that if you just bridge the data line through between those two pcbs that data line may not be at the same voltage reference to the zero volts this is the sort of thing that is much easier to explain with diagrams than with words and waving my hands around i hope you're following what i'm saying so if these different pcbs were being supplied totally independently by different power supplies and they did not have their ground connections or zero volt connections bridged across from one pcb to the next that could cause big problems but we are safe here and in fact what i would do my preference here now this has been brought up i i probably wouldn't have thought of this if you hadn't asked the question dodgy so it was a good one what i would probably do is provide five volt and ground at both ends of the pcb and bridge them across so that the ground is definitely common in each of those spots oh my throat's not doing well today okay so that would guarantee that we would have a zero volt reference across that's common across all the pcbs however we are lucky in this case because we get a in fact let's have a look we get a common uh in negative yeah yes yes we do get lucky in fact i'm going to bring up some alternative camera reviews and show you what i mean i didn't i haven't prepared for this so i'll um start up the microscope camera and the overhead camera and i'll make sure their their hdmi captures are turned on and then let's have a look at this so let's have a look at where are we overhead overhead camera yes overhead all right so let's see how far we can zoom in on this because i've been playing around with the power supplies on this i um let's see how far we can go before it yeah it won't focus beyond there about there come on focus focus all right so right here these are the um the voltage regulator modules from the back of it and i i ended up disconnecting modules and rearranging the power rails just to see if it was a power problem which is why i've got these ones out loose but what you can see here is that we've got in negative in positive and out negative and out positive so in here we have 12 volts coming in on the input side and we get 5 volts coming in on it coming out on the output side now the key here is the connection between the in negative and the out negative if those are bridged across on the pcb it means that we are going to have a common ground because the ground will be bridged between all those voltage regulator modules so let's start up the trusty multimeter in continuity mode which so you can hear we've got continuity there now one thing that can be attractive you're checking continuity on power supplies sometimes it seems like there's continuity when there's not because there'll be capacitors and things so you can actually trick your multimeter into thinking this continuity i've left it on for a little while and it's stayed often what will happen is that you'll touch it and you'll get a beep and the beep is just because you're charging a capacitor using the um the test the test voltage and once the capacitor has charged up then the beeping stops and it seems like you don't have continuity anymore and then the capacitor might leak or it'll discharge through a resistor or something on the board you take your probes off and then put them back on and it beeps and it can be really confusing so anyway this looks this is actually true continuity there is a direct connection on the pcb but let's have a look under the oldie old time microscope and let's see what we can find zoom it out get some focus get some focus then we focus there somewhere oh here we go nice we got focus and a bit of visual inspection and you can see that it actually is connected you can see this large part of the pcb it's very cleary turn that brightness down it doesn't need as much for the camera as it does for my eyes so this major part of the pcb in the middle here that's a copper plane and you can see that the negative side of the in is tied to it and the outside is tied to it so yeah you can see it's a little bit hard to see there there isn't any even any thermal relief you can see that this pad is simply an exposed part of that plane it's directly connected this whole plane is connected to the negative side of the output and the entire plane is also connected to the negative sign of the input there is no gap there there is no thermal relief or anything it's just a straight through connection and that means that we don't have a problem with our ground reference so that was a um that was a an interesting little squirrel to chase thanks for bringing that one up dodgy it's definitely worth thinking about it's really important to make sure that uh we need a whiteboard cam aaron just said yes what i should do is get another camera do i have one uh the problem would be capturing it i've got another one of these cameras that i use for the overhead cameras and i could mount that on the wall over there pointing at my whiteboard and then i could just uh look a um yeah just walk over there and start drawing diagrams i could just draw diagrams here like if i go to the overhead camera i could chuck a bit of paper down here and draw some diagrams that's probably a better solution but a whiteboard cam would be a very cool idea and some people use tablets and that sort of thing as well to draw on and then have it overlaid on the video um [Music] uh yeah so austin's creations um said i think the power supplies are ground connected they look like generic ebay ones that are interconnected versus isolator type yet austin's creations i assume your name is austin i i'll just call you austin from now on if that's okay so austin you are absolutely correct yes we have just verified that the the v in negative and v out negative are physically tied together on the pcb all right um oh electron ash said i'm currently trying to design a qsb quick solder board for a console in eagle so i'm here but only in spirit okay so ash if i keep mentioning your name is that going to break your concentration i'm sorry did i break your concentration and screw up your ability to design your pcb uh i said i've had sausage bacon and chips waiting in the fridge since last night what um okay now henrik pointed out a very interesting point here as well so henrik said these modules only have a max load three amp if i'm correct so maybe it's overloading the converter um that was my first thought as well but it's not um one of the reason one of the things that we can demonstrate that is that the flickering occurs when the brightness is turned down which means that the current requirements are reduced not when the current requirements are increased and actually the reason that i have these two modules sitting right here is that there were three regulator modules running just that one word so just the house board had three regulator modules behind it and they were connecting to different parts of the pcb so here in the pcb you can see that there are different 5 volt connections spread across it and the three regulators were connected to the three different three five volt things so one of my theories was that these voltage regulators don't like being connected directly in parallel with they're often okay if you have the same common ground but if you then connect their positive outputs together in parallel so basically it's taking taking two modules and just you know putting them directly parallel and bridging across their inputs and bridging across their outputs so in theory that gives you instead of three amps and three amps it gives you a total of six amps available but there can be some bad interactions with switch mode power supplies because they are sampling their output in order to adjust the duty cycle internally so they've got an inductor on them and the way these work is that they act as a chopper circuit and they they top up the charge in the inductor by adjusting their duty cycle and they change the duty cycle by sampling the output side so if you've got two of them in parallel their outputs can interfere with each other and then you can have bad things happening so that was one theory was that we just happened to have a an unlucky situation where we had three voltage regulators connected in parallel and their outputs were interacting in some way so the reason i removed these two is i changed it from using three voltage regulators to just one voltage regulator and i checked the supply rail and it stays rock solid on five volts doesn't have any problems and you can see it flickering now that is with the brightness turned way down so the amount of current that it's pulling is actually very very small it's there is no way that it's getting near the um the limit of that regulator uh yeah so henrik said do you have an oscilloscope try to measure the voltage ripple of the brightness is down first measure the dimmer regulators and then the brighter flicker regulator yeah so checking this on an oscilloscope is the i really wish that i could pull the scope screen up that is something i need to figure out so i've got i've got a raigol scope here which has oh it has an hdmi output which means i could run it into a video capture device and then i could feed that into obs and i could stream my oscilloscope screen ah i need more hdmi capture devices if i need one for the scope and i need one for a whiteboard camera all right i'm not going to try to do that right now because um it would be i would spend the rest of the live stream messing around trying to set things up but yes squirrel alert um yeah frederick said i'm convinced it's something with wled i saw multiple presets could it be that one preset has been activated on the segment controlling house yeah so this is where i'm going i have poked and prodded this i haven't put a scope on it but i've poked and prodded this i've changed the power supply set up i've measured voltages like all the way down the chain everything looks spot on and there is that weirdness going on in wled and so my next the next thing i'm going to do before i actually spend more time looking at the electronics is i'm just going to get the latest wled which i think is 0 to 11.1 so this is currently running 0.11 and there is a newer a very slightly newer release 11.1 so i'm going to grab that and do a full clean software installation with no segments defined and just see what happens maybe the problem will go away and i've just spent the last hour talking about something that isn't even really a problem and we're chasing imaginary squirrels but imaginary squirrels can be interesting sometimes anyway uh yeah might as well get three i'm talking about hdmi capture mitchell said might as well get three and have one spare for the next squirrel yes so i need two more right now and uh who knows what's going to come up next uh yes my part of my problem is is running too many hdmi capture devices into this computer i probably need a better way of dealing with it through obs or i'm going to start having issues i did i did notice i don't know whether you could tell on the stream itself but my preview window in obs when i turned on those extra two hdmi capture devices for the overhead camera and the microscope the screen started stuttering i'm going to turn them off now so bye bye video sources and maybe obs will have to do a little bit less work to be processing all the inputs mitchell said you need an ndi capture kit ndi can run over a network so limits the amount of resources required on your pc yes ending okay squirrel squirrel squirrels you know that i'm going to be googling ndi ndi capture ndi tools okay what is ndi capture ndi capture works seamlessly with nvidia based gpus to make your screen available as an ndi source on the network um all right i'm gonna have to look into that some more and i know that uh i know obs can bring in network based video streams like icsp streams and things so another option is that i just set up video sources that are like um you know like security cameras essentially and just bring them in over the network but still i think it's not just the capture that is the issue it is processing the video streams that is is the thing but anyway i really like the idea of getting video capture on my scope that would be handy we could look at some interesting things and do some actual live hands-on things all right um [Music] okay you know that thing you do when you spill a drink or something and just sit there for 10 seconds trying to process what just happened what what if i missed in the um can you just grab the hdmi and the ipad camera and use that for yes henrik i could but my i'd have to pull the scope out it's um uh oh yeah james get an atm mini pro to handle camera switching yeah that would be nice um so the reason it's not just a matter of pulling out the hdmi cable and plugging it into the scope is that i have everything kind of stuck there let's uh let's see if i can bring up a camera view where is it droid cam droid cam yes yes yes okay so two five ipaddressive.2 let's see if my camera setting is still working and i can oh maybe i need to be no i think i need to be on a different wi-fi network so i'm just going to switch i'm on a restricted network at the moment so i'm going to switch to a different network that hopefully will allow the yes there we go okay so now we have video streaming and the frame rate is really low this is making me seasick just looking at it okay so i'm pulling back away from my computer now so you can see where i was sitting looking at my computer and just to the right you can see the workbench so there is the microscope and just up above it i'm trying to move this phone very slowly so i don't make it all seasick you can see the overhead camera up there and the oscilloscope is right there but everything is kind of stuck in in fact this scope is currently it's blue tacked in place it's sitting on the bench i'm pulling it back and forwards and it's quite stable and then just to the side of that i've got a signal generator and this is a a wooden frame so basically it's a an enclosure for the signal generator with a spot to put notebooks and the um if you don't measure you don't know uh device and just to the right of that i've got a multimeter and this is also stuck in place so it's just a handheld multimeter but on the back of it i've put some little l brackets and i've glued them onto the enclosure and then that is stuck down to the shelf and what that means is that i can just you know i can reach up and turn the multimeter and you know change leads and things press the button and it doesn't go anywhere and then i've got the lamp power supplies over here these are stuck down as well so once again i can push them so i can press stuff on the keypad and it doesn't move so on my workbench a lot of that stuff is actually stuck in place and to get to the hdmi port on this i'm going to have to pull this out it'll take a little bit of rearranging i can do it but it's it's just not something i'm going to do right now on the live stream so i'll just pan across to the right and there you can see the flickering display because of the depth of field on this is much deeper than with the other camera you can see the outline of the word super a lot better and yes so back to here and time to switch to front view okay uh how do i get out of this come on my what is going on with my phone i now that it's in the droid cam thing and it's streaming it's right what i can't even see what's going on in on the screen okay that's it i'm out of it now that's better point the droid cam at the scope yep i could do that uh hmm all right where are we at uh yeah oh so oh okay i'm just scrolling back to see what what those comments were so electronic said i spilled half a pint of coke earlier with scotch in the workshop room fun yes don't do that that makes a mess um all right no aaron we don't want the stream to die again sorry i'm this is going to be boring for a few seconds i'm just trying to catch myself up on um on comments and oh mitchell has just added a reference in discord which is cool thanks mitchell a reference to hdmi to ndi encoders and that will be very useful i'm going to in fact i'm going to open that in my browser right now so that it's there adding to my big list of network tabs all those prices are scary five hundred dollars for a mini hdmi to ndi encoder all right i will look into that but that's a lot of kangaroo bucks um right so uh cool and there was a message from andy and a few minutes ago asking if i'm brave enough to take the sign down and start doing some diagnostics life i'm kind of heading in that direction this is not at all what i was going to talk about on this live stream this whole thing was just uh oh look the sign is running and it's flickering and now an hour later i'm still talking about it what i was actually going to do was um was a little bit more of running arduino lint to show you what i was trying to do on the stream last week ah yeah okay so uh nasa blue tack um oh a couple of people are asking about the oscilloscope so yes it's a rival to ds2072 with all of the software updates applied so it's got i think it's actually 200 megahertz bandwidth whereas um by default it's what is it 70 megahertz yeah it's one of those things where rygall produce a number of different scopes with different features and they have a different label on the front and they have different you know limits when you turn them on you can turn the frequency up to a certain thing and it just stops and it turns out that the electronics is exactly the same so it's actually um i might be my this is an old scope in fact you can't even buy this one anymore it's out of production but i think this scope had the same electronics it was physically the same as a 200 megahertz 200 yes as a 200 megahertz scope but they limited it in software so then you would have um you'd pay less and you get less less of a frequency range but if you there was something you could do and like you put a i think it was a firmware file you put a firmware file on an sd card and you stick it in the scope and you boot it and then it boots up as if it's the higher model scope and you get all of the extra features and all the bandwidth so that one is running as uh with everything turned on it's got all of the protocol decoders and all those sorts of things and the extended frequency yeah um [Music] laughing the squirreling yes matt's head got inserted the squirrel of leds to prevent you breaking the internet with that we know lint yeah maybe i should oh this is an interesting idea yeah i have thought about this david howes suggested how about a simple this is getting back to the whole video capture thing so we're chasing a squirrel from a squirrel right now the um right now what i've got is a separate video capture device for each of these cameras so there's one for microscope one for overhead one for front camera so i'm running three hdmi capture devices right now but another option is to use an hdmi switch and have one hdmi capture device going into an hdmi switch with multiple sources and then you can just switch which camera you want to select from or which source you want and that actually may be a really good solution as long as i can pick sources that i don't want to show at the same time so for example when i switch to overhead you're not going to get it right now but i'm getting hdmi capture off because i turned off the overhead thing i'm getting hdmi capture from the front camera it's doing a screen capture off my desktop and hdmi capture off the overhead so i'm actually running two different hdmi captures simultaneously to get that view and i still want to be able to do that but there are situations where there are two sources that you you never need to use them at the same time and in that case an hdmi switch is probably a great solution because hdmi switches are reasonably cheap and it doesn't add any overhead in terms of you know decoding the video stream because it's only getting one stream it's just switching between different sources so that is a really good suggestion thank you very much for bringing that up so um yeah i should probably get myself an hdmi source um oh james said that's the atm yeah but i think the atm mini pro is way more than that because it it's basically like a an embedded computer it does picture in picture and a whole lot of other things and also they're pretty expensive um how much is an a10 mini pro they're like many hundreds of dollars atm mini pro yeah they're like nine hundred dollars uh 859 at video yeah that's a lot um [Music] where let's see how much black magic happens yeah well blackmagic themselves listed for 945 yeah i could buy another camera for that uh i think a just a simple hdmi video source is um and he just said to face it it's no longer your live session the audience and live chat is in control just like the truman show yeah i have totally lost control of this live stream i don't know what i'm doing um yes uh yeah okay matt you're right and so i can't do picture-in-picture with an hdmi uh source so if i need to do scope and whiteboard at the same time that would be a problem but i do think that a an hdmi switch would be a good partial solution i would still want multiple hdmi capture devices so i probably continue with the three that i currently have but then i might be able to like what would we never want at the same time we'd never well we want it all the i never want the microscope and the overhead at the same time so i could put those on the same capture device with a switch because if i've got a device if i'm moving something between the two of them you can't see them you can't actually see both cameras at the same time there's no point so typically what i would do is have the side camera or front camera and one of the those i could combine those onto a switch and then i could use the third hdmi capture for the um oscilloscope because one thing that we would want to do is show the oscilloscope at the same time as the overhead camera or the microscope because we want to be able to see the traces on the screen and watch what's being probed at the same time that's very useful talking about probing and no i'm not talking about alien abduction i got a really interesting thing during the week i ordered it a couple of weeks ago and it just arrived i haven't actually put it together yet but it's a frame i'm going to do lots of hand waving here it's out in the um in the garage at the moment in pieces it's a frame that allows you to put test probes onto a board and then leave them in position without you touching it now i did that video a while ago in fact i've got this test i've got this test probe set up and i've got um if i get it down without knocking everything else [Music] so i've got this this is a steel base and i made versions of the test probes with a magnet in the bottom so that i can just go snap and it just stays in position so what i can do is and i've made pcb mount things as well so what i can do is put a pcb on here and then move the test probe and stick it on and it just maintains connection and then i can connect that to an oscilloscope or whatever device i want so i do have a couple of these other test jigs but this design looks really interesting it was it's basically a frame with a clear acrylic plate with a whole lot of holes in it and all you do and it's got test probes that look like pens with pogo pins on the end so you just sit them down through the holes and gravity just holds and they just rest on the the board that you're testing and so i oh hang on evie blog showed it mike brown said oh cool okay i missed that one i did not know that um that dave had already shown that one on video i'll have to check that out so i've um uh oh mike said this is an interesting idea mike brown said you can display the scope directly on your computer over the network yes i'd forgotten about that the oscilloscope has an ethernet socket on it and you can run software on the computer that talks to the scope and shows you everything on the screen and that way i could just do screen capture so i wouldn't even need a device plugged in i wouldn't need to do hdmi capture ah okay um yeah sig rock and pulse view yeah i need to be i'm going to write notes to myself you a lot are too full of good ideas so you're giving me a to-do list okay things to look up after the live stream it is um ryegol screen capture which could be software or hdmi and ndi capture and what else was there oh whiteboard camera hello yeah thinking about it more i think the sensible thing to do would be to just utilize the overhead camera more and draw diagrams on here what else sigrok ds2072 thanks mike so sig rock d s 2072 brilliant ah aaron said it allows you to excuse me okay hopefully that's better aaron said allows you to stand up for health reasons during your two hour streams yes i might get deep vein thrombosis from sitting here make your desk out of a whiteboard and draw on the desk well i could do that you can't see it right now but this so my desk is uh is yellow tongue floor sheeting so i made this just by attaching pine frame like strips to the walls and then i cut this out of floor sheeting and then painted it all gloss white so the entire workbench is actually gloss white enamel paint and it's quite hard and smooth and shiny so i could just write on this with whiteboard markers and wipe it off it wouldn't be a problem ah yeah all right and someone just ma oh pancake legend you're here hey andrew um uh so [Music] um all right going back that's how matt said i also need to know why the toaster is there yeah i mentioned that right at the start of the stream that's because i was filming a video about two-year conversion to tasmota and i was using the um i was just using that as a prop just holding it up in front of the camera and talking about it so yeah so he says maybe plans to laser engrave a super house logo onto the toast i one one of the first things i did when i got my laser cutter was put a tortilla in it and use it to cut out a dinosaur a dinosaur shape out of a tortilla um to entertain my daughter and somewhere around i've got a photo of it i'd have to um i'd have to look around but it probably actually wouldn't be that hard to find photos no i'm not going to go digging right now but i do have a photo of a tortilla which has been laser cut with a dinosaur shape so i need to refocus myself what is the point of these live streams i don't even know what i'm doing i'm i'm just rambling okay so i see it said the first 3d prints were given to the kids yeah um okay mako may go is it going to the electronics room so see you're all by mako thanks for hanging around for a while uh yeah okay all right matt said that pretty enjoyable though these live streams thank you i don't quite understand why but that's uh somehow they still end up being fun fun for me anyway hopefully hopefully fun for everybody else okay and pancake said chat is still an ai simulation we're here to age you with your recovery yeah so andrew are you just gpt3 it's sitting there on a um virtual keyboard probably all right so you haven't been seeing it but i've been sitting here ooh bribe or donation andy said five bucks probably donation to focus on solving rgb led sign problem in the next 40 minutes i have 39 minutes left john's internet of squirrels okay so um all right i can be bought for five dollars let's let's work this out all right the matrix has you for five dollars i will try to solve that flickering led sign problem in the next 40 minutes okay clear the decks oh johnny just put in 50 sec as well i am i looked up i was really curious and the thing is that i don't actually get this whole thing about sex i know that whenever i'm watching other people's live streams people keep donating in sec and i did look up what that was a while ago it's a currency oh james has doubled down us ten dollars thanks james um so what is sek currency what is it okay it's cr it's a swedish chrono and let's say um 50 sec to aud it's 7.78 okay cool i um i've seen a few people donating in sec and i don't know why is there a reason that people choose to use that is there some electron ash okay maybe that's not james said i'm not working on the sign yes i was chasing currency squirrels all right i'm clearing the deck i am moving stuff out of the way and what i'm going to do i will actually be kind of disappointed if this works but what i'm going to do is grab the sign bring it down here reflash firmware and see what happens so let's try it okay power is disconnected i have the sign i'm going to need to turn on my overhead video capture again just in case i need to do that but all right so i've never actually flashed wled let us find out together what is involved and i'm gonna save no i'm just quitting out of eagle and um oh mike suggested power directly from your lab power supply yeah so that's one of the things is i could bypass all of the on those voltage regulators that are on it and run it straight off a lab supply now i've got to get out of keynote because i had that presentation open from earlier and um pancake legend thank you for the five dollars gauntlet throne all right now what do we have here let's come back to come on switch switch my scene switcher is has stopped working oh there it worked eventually all right so we have here uh okay so just flash the bin file tesmatizer or esp home flasher will do awesome thanks aaron so what i need to do is grab w led and i will just grab the binary and run tasmatizer so i need a usb cable and i should have plenty of them right here and turn this over can i get to it yes i can okay that's relief i thought maybe i wouldn't be able to get to the usb socket on this and oh i might need a different usb cable because there's not much room i know it went it fitted in it's uh it's not much space there okay so let's have a look at uh releases where are we on this page tutorials somewhere okay quick start wiki which i think just has a link to the binary full release binary that's what i want and then what happens did it do it download nope okay esp tool um and what where where where am i looking in the right place where do i download it from that's what i want uh download the latest release binary file i thought that was the link i just clicked on all right so i want which one the basic one i guess esp8266 bin and let's grab that one and i'll just go back to the tutorial and he said can moderators turn off john's chat so he focuses on the resolution all right i will i will try to avoid looking at the chat which means you can't help me which is sad so uh now somewhere down here all right it had um back here it had an explanation and i want this one i believe led pin is gpio2 in this case so just the regular esp8266 bin which is the one that i just downloaded all right so where is pull up a terminal where do i have a tasmatizer looks like i do come on desmatizer do your thing where are you uh has it launched i can't see it anywhere um okay is it just because it's off there it is it's hiding in the background oh stop that all right so tasmatizer what have we got i haven't plugged anything in yet because i wanted to see what port it comes up on so i'll plug that in there is a squealing noise i think because it's trying to power the leds okay 14 440 bin file i want to grab the download where where are we downloads downloads wled that's the one i want and erase before flashing yes let's do that and let's just test my ties go go go this should yeah because it's got a raise before flashing turned on this should remove any of the existing configuration so i'll need to link this back into my wi-fi and do all of those sorts of things writing okay while i was doing it i will look at the chat [Music] okay isolate the problem third block instead yeah simple test with known controller and software okay yes so we're going to reflash it and see what happens check as your wled may have over the air uh yeah maybe it did but i wanted to do a full clean reinstallation including erasing the flash because i wanted to make sure there was nothing existing from the configuration so i can start again okay so we now have it flashed and all right i'm going to actually one thing that would be interesting is i'm going to run this off my lap supply into the um into the input that goes to all of the onboard voltage regulators because at least then i will be able to see how much current it's pulling even if uh even if it's not using the lab power supply for providing the regulated voltage oh except that i can't ah this is a um it's a two 2.5 millimeter dc jack not a 2.1 millimeter so i can't actually plug that in all right let's plug it back in to its normal power supply but i'm going to switch this back over here and see what happens back to its power supply and i assume that this is just like default behavior but nothing comes up oh it's booting okay so there's something happening there put it back up there and then i'm going to need to use my phone to reconnect to it so hopefully right now it will be advertising and ssid that i can connect to and i don't see one so somehow remember my presets hmm okay come on why am i not saying it unless it's esp is it that does it just come up as esp i thought it would come up as a wled type network installer binary all right i thought the network would be called w led yeah wled ap it's not coming up i don't know what's going on okay i do want instead of having it all the way over here i do want to have it over there which means i can either change remove that let's see what else i can find i might have another cable 2.5 millimeter pc plugs inside so i've got some down here and this may end up as a bit of the actuating exercise let's see if i've got a 2.5 millimeter dc plug over here okay let's just relocate this power supply i'll bring it over here this way i can get the multimeter on it and maybe the scope and see what's going on oops all right let's try again plug that in and i now have a single digit that is illuminated so i actually have a feeling that maybe the cable was just falling out of the power supply earlier which is why it was doing that what did i just do with my phone it's over there so now we should if that is working we should get a uh we should get a thing that we can connect to yeah i'm still not seeing a wled network hmm i wonder if my flashing didn't work properly i might have nuked it interestingly can when you have a wled now there is actually a thing on here which i don't recognize which is an esp network i wonder if that's it i'm just going to switch to it to see what happens so it might not be coming up as wf w led okay switching and all right what have you done using it should be let's get in this qr code okay let's see what this does connect to this network but that network doesn't exist yeah for some reason it is not coming up oh i wonder if as you said in the um yes yeah it's probably still got the the settings in its wifi in fact it might have come up on my normal i know it's worked my phone is now connected to wled ap so let's see what we can do from here what's the ip address i've got to get to uh i think it's what is it ip of 4321 okay 4.3.2.1 go hey it says welcome to wled so i am actually connected to it now wi-fi settings okay network name i'm going to connect to my normal network and network password i'm doing my best not to actually say the password as i'm putting it in leave all of that save save and connect now wi-fi settings saved okay so now i'm just going to see if it's come back up on the same ip address on my normal network it has okay i'm going to switch it back to the desktop so you can see what's going on all right and ideally we need this somewhere that you can see it as well so where can we put it over here is that safe and in field of view it's just in the field of view once i move my chair it should be better yep so you can see the sign i'm going to move it back out a little bit there all right so now we can see the sign and we can see the ui and it says you have no presets yet however there's a backup preset data of a previous installation available all right just for the fun of it i'm going to copy that to the clipboard and i'm going to what am i going to stick it in [Music] i'm going to stick it in notes just so that i have it in case i need it but part of the point of this is i wanted a nice clean installation from scratch so i am not going to save a preset i'm not going to you know reuse the existing one let's just try what is the most basic thing solid no config we've got to change the number of leds no not wi-fi setup i want led preferences led count 30. so the led count is actually i had this written down earlier 385 that says max 5 volt 22 amps for most effects 8 amps is enough yes okay so i'm just going to leave everything else default i think unless there's something weird going on is there anything strange in the defaults i don't think so probably the default color order default brightness apply preset so 0 uses default transitions crossfade brightness i don't know i'll just leave them all as defaults change that and look at that we've got some we've got some flickering going on that's interesting so uh where are we i'm just gonna should show orange if okay some call it fun said yeah same problem okay now oh james said i also save the segment info if you need it uh oh yeah doctor said we can lip read the password um the password is just password yes not quite uh you gotta add numbers as well so it's and do it in late so the password is actually p4 what is it p4ssw0rd or maybe p455 w0id what am i doing okay so what we've got is the same problem i'm just just to confirm this i'm going to turn the brightness right down and i'm going to try with the brightness up a bit as well so you can see that the end area is flickering in a bit of a strange way and let's change color to blue but if i turn the brightness up let's see if the flickering gets limited to the end still flickering all right let's try a different effect oh this is going to be interesting because it's working its way along and you can see as it gets towards the end the flicker begins to occur and the colors go a bit crazy as well it's no longer just blue all right well so we're back to a um a default setup and [Music] that said can you power this thing from a basic arduino sketch using fast led library then adafruit library um yeah on me who said faulty led uh i was wondering about that but the thing is that there are so many characteristics of what's going on here that just totally throw me off and one is that the position at which this effect begins changes depending on the brightness level that that little thing just totally messes with my mind so i'm going to change this back to solid so it's all on in fact let's go back to front camera so you can see it a bit better you can see that the weirdness is going all the way to the start of house there now if i turn the brightness up a little bit you can see that it doesn't really go into the h i'll turn it up a little bit more it takes a while for the um the thing to scan across oh it's doing all of the h maybe i have been chasing maybe i've been thrown off the scent this whole time because the behavior is not what i thought it was so you can see that the weirdness comes to around this area and the furthest it gets it's about here and if i turn the brightness up a bit more then oh it does still go into the edge that's interesting so it still makes it to this point you can see that most of the effect is over towards the right but it is still coming across now if i turn the brightness up more it does still come part way across which suggests some kind of an issue somewhere around the center of the h okay so uh yeah matt said i'm convinced it's power regulated as a power related as scott says but looking at it now i thought the position was changing when i was doing this before maybe the position has not been changing i've just turned the brightness way way down it's down to like 5 or something so these leds are just barely on and these ones are coming on more but the it is coming across further than i noticed before it is coming across into the h even at the lowest brightness level so okay my next the next thing that i would do in this is oh um so johnny said the buck regulator doesn't like to be low powered no i know what you're saying um so what johnny's referring to there is the um the input to the regulator if it goes down below a certain point a buck regulator will drop out and um it'll start doing strange things but in this case they are getting a constant 12 volts input and it's the illumination is being set by the pwm inside the leds it's not being set by the voltage that's being supplied to it yeah so what i'm going to do is [Music] i'm going to take the output from the d1 mini that is currently going into the start of the word super so it's currently going in in being in the data is being injected right there into the start of the s and then it's following along the chain all the way through and then through the um through the logo and then from the logo it's going out and then into the word house what i'm going to do is take the data line that currently goes into here disconnect it and connect it all the way across here directly into or maybe i'll do it into the start of the logo so basically i'm going to take the word super out of it inject the data further along and see if anything matt said if the soldering iron doesn't come out for this live stream i'll eat my hat hang on i just got it do something computer turn on the soldering iron okay done i would not want matt to have to eat his hat yeah so what i need to do is grab the data d2 okay so data line two now unfortunately you're not really going to be able to see anything much here um i'm gonna find the data entry point it must be being bridged across on the other side of the pcb all right i'm gonna have to pull up eagle for a moment and uh give myself x-ray vision to see what's going on here [Laughter] james said oh god you get to see the mess i was being a little bit hesitant about showing the overhead camera i don't i don't necessarily want to reveal someone else's work so projects eagle archive where okay sorry i'm just scrolling through many many design files here okay so we've got the we're coming in from that corner on the word super and then where is the inlet it must be being breached on the other side of the pcb so james you can probably confirm for me that the i might actually not be able to do this because um i i actually can't fully disassemble this i can only see part of the back of the pcb and i can't get access to anything else it's glued together like everything is glued closed so if the data lines bridge across on the other side of the pcb i can't get to them um which will be interesting um now what i can do though is that trick i was talking about earlier okay yeah yeah yeah we can do this all right super house logo board i'm just going to pull that up we can do a little bit of pcb surgery here and inject the data in a different location so if we switch to this view here all right so you can see this is the central board [Music] and i'm just looking for the one that is closest to the end of the chain all right down here nice so this if i can highlight it okay so this point here here we go so this is a track on the back side of the pcb the blue is the back of the pcb and that's what i can see and that is a data line so data out coming from this led going to data in on this led so because i can get to the back of the pcb what i can do is cut this track and inject the data at this point and that effectively will have moved we'll have moved our source of the data from the beginning of the chain to um like past halfway along the chain and let's oh if i can get to that part of it because there is um there is wood frame across this i may not even be able to see that part of the pcb no okay i'm going to [Music] have to look on here to find so james do you mind if i show this or would you prefer i didn't i don't mind either way i'm quite happy to keep this view off camera just removing some glue what i need to do is find a piece of the pcb where the um where one of those tracks goes across the back now is there one somewhere near them oh there's one sort of in the middle of this pcb just here so if you look at that oops at that track that is nearly in the middle of the pcb it's just up a little bit from center i should be able to get to that but to do that i need to lift a couple of voltage regulators so that i can move them out of the way see what i can get in here oh okay that nasty cracking sound was just the glue letting go and just this one doesn't want to come off so i've got one of them i may only need to move one i'm trying to remove move the voltage regulators that are currently on the back of the pcb so that i can get to that track here we go making some progress that's removing it getting closer to it sounds like i'm totally butchering it but i think it's okay and where is that track somewhere on the back of that pcb oh there it is okay i can see it very good yes we can do this now uh um ah me who said not sure if it will work after you inject the signal with previous led still in circuit um no it's good that's going to be okay and what i'm going to do is actually cut the track on the pcb so that we're isolating the we're basically going to take a string of leds which is what we currently have and we're going to cut it in half and inject the data part way along uh so um sorry i'm just doing a quick check on comments there's another bottom trace in the middle of the at sign yes yes um just checking um is the cat missing there are no caps as far as i can see so [Music] i don't think there are any capacitors on any of these um [Music] oh lee said you could do with a moderator in a voice call with you to relay messages from people in the chat yeah okay so what i was just doing was checking whether uh it is okay james hasn't said anything for a while i'm wondering if james thinks it's okay for me to show this all right let's see what we can do i'm just going to bring the microscope over so you can see kind of a track and drop you to microscope view is it yes it is working okay so what we're looking at here if i get some focus into it there we go there's some focus so that little track that you can see right there is if i switch back to desktop view this track right here that little dog leg sort of thing in fact if i um i'll flip the pcb so that we're looking at it from the back side of the pcb and that track there is that track right there so what i can do is grab my trusty scalpel and try to keep everything out of the way and i can come in here and do a little cut i'm trying to do this without getting a um a shard of copper bridging across to the 5 volt plane because that would not be ideal let's get some zoom happening we're way too far out here get the position a bit better i'll focus it for the camera not for my eyes so i'm looking at it a little bit out of focus at the moment okay so we now have a nice isolation in the data line and where i want to go in d out dn is the one in the top right so oops not that one that one so the via in the top right is d in to the rest of the chain and so i want to patch data into there good get that off i should have cleaned up my soldering iron it's looking pretty gross right so i want data in to go there and at the moment data in is coming from two so you can't see this because i'm off to the side but i'm just going to pull the data wire off the d1 mini grab myself a chunk of wire how much do i need it's a bit actually it's in fact i'll make a longer because i want to i want i might want to inject further down in a moment long enough that i can reach all the way down the side extraction thing which makes a nasty buzzing noise but it pulls the smoke out of my face which is always nice all right so i'll connect this wire to d2 on the d1 mini then can you still see the microscope yes you can just all right so i'll bring this one in here [Music] solder it on hopefully the solder mask is doing its job because i've got this white loop this wire directly on top of the solder mask okay now let's see what happens so now we have data injected at that midpoint of the side i'll turn this over bring it back over here and i'll switch cameras in a second so that you can see everything apply power again interesting okay so what you can see is the pure orange and this is very interesting so what we're doing is injecting data part way through the at symbol and now i'm going to go to what am i going to switch to i've got to switch back to wled and so yep you can still see it just okay now i'm going to turn the brightness down let's see what happens it's working check that out that's really interesting so i'm going to switch it over to blue and i've got the brightness turned way way down and i'll switch back to the other camera so you can see it a little bit better and we've got no flickering it is working um [Music] all right i'm slightly baffled now the interesting thing here i'm just thinking about the next step from this so what this indicates to me i'm going to turn the brightness up in fact i'm just going to mess around with it a bit i'm going to try different things different effects just to see if it all runs so that's with brightness on maximum that's with brightness on minimum i'll turn it up so the brightness is just enough that you can see it somewhere around here yeah around there you can see that and you can see that this is working flawlessly i'm going to change change the effects to android all right it's now doing the effect that was totally failing before and i am going to [Music] okay what i'm going to do is move the injection point back not to the start but a bit further back and see what happens this is very interesting um in fact what would be interesting would be to take the output of this word and feed it back in to near the start that would be very very interesting yeah andy said need to gather evidence from an oscilloscope etc while the problem is occurring see whether the data in for the first led on the third block looks the same on the last led on the third block yeah uh okay so what do we alright i am going to because this is actually a reasonably easy thing to do the next thing i'm going to do is move the oh okay interestingly you can see that it's gone blankier that's because this effect it thinks it still has 385 leds connected but it only has this many so it gets to the end of this point and then it's off it's off in fairy land somewhere in um with leds that aren't actually connected so what we can do is take the output from that word and inject it somewhere way back up the chain i'm going to go as far back as i can let's switch back to here and like phantom leg yes exactly peter said my money is still on john having broken it yeah i think that's quite likely all right now i'm going to load now the word super the super board i want to find the point the furthest up here closest to the start where i can inject and if there is anywhere there may not be any in this particular pcb let's oh there are some in the in the u okay so there's one here i could inject at that point because the thing is i can't actually access this part of the pcb up in the top corner it's that part is covered by the wood frame and i can't get to that that particular thing so what i'm going to what i could do is inject the data back in at this point and [Music] um but before i do that where is it back over here okay but before i do that i'm going to do something else entirely i'm going to remove that data line and feed it back into where it was originally going now this is a bit of a um an a b testing thing so what i just did right then was i soldered the line back to the original injection point because i want to see if the problem off of course i've got to bridge across that track back over here all right because what i want to do is see if the problem comes back now you might be wondering why i would do that and that is and you'd be thinking of course it's going to come back because you're just switching it back to the way it was before but i'm on the wrong camera let's switch back to here but the thing is that when i'm doing tests like this i like to be able to revert to a previous state and validate that the change you've made has actually had the effect that you expected or not so what i'm going to do is so i make the change and see the change and then undo the change and then you see it go back to doing what it was before and it's just a way of proving to myself that the thing that i changed did change the thing i thought i changed i'm not making a whole lot of sense maybe you get what i mean maybe i don't make any sense okay so let's start i should now be back bridged again switch back to here and yes i am aware that i have now blown my time on this i failed to fix it within the 40 minutes all right turn it back on and it's bright there's no flickering at all but i'm going to switch back to wled turn the brightness back down and see if the flickering occurs again come on turn down i've got to reload the um the interface uh brightness what is going on it should be orange why is it all green let's change oh there we go and brightness turn back up brightness turn back down why isn't the brightness turning down oh there it goes and there's no flicker oh i saw something it just it just did something strange all right now i'm going to change this to uh i've got to change the color all right solid let's try changing it to android what's going on with this i'm changing things in the ui and i'm not seeing changes in look at that oh no no there is a little bit of flicker there right i'm going to change it back to solid and brightness down brightens down change the colors why isn't it changing it's just staying orange well it's gone it's actually red i have changed the all the colors on this to be blue now and it has not changed it is doing weird things back to the android effect like it's taking a really really long time from the time i click anything in the ui to when anything happens and now nothing is happening loading ui come on nothing is changing power cycle this i don't know whether you can alright you can't tell because it's so clear but there is one led that i can see just up here that is blue when everything else around it is green which is a little odd and now back to bringing up the web ui bring the brightness down come on they're going to respond back to solid i've got the brightness turned way way down now and it is not coming on what am i ah my mouth is not engaged properly yes peter said yes i did break it um [Music] i have a feeling that this might be that the data is not coming from the ws 2812 properly with that big dodgy wire that i just connected it's quite possible that what's happening is that the um the data line has just changed now i'm i'm touching it with my hands now and it's changing i'm actually influencing the data that is being sent by physically touching it now i'm kind of tempted to add a level shifter into it because i suspect that we're we're actually dealing with multiple things here and what might be happening is that that voltage uh offset that i was talking about earlier the um the output from the ws 20 from the d1 mini is 3.3 volts and it's marginal on the spec for going into the the led so i think what might be happening is that now that i've bodged those wire connections it's enough that it's um it's not connecting properly so i'm going to undo that let's pull this and i'm going to remove that that blodge wire that i just put on a second ago take off that sorry you can't see what i'm doing right now but this will only take a moment and i'm going back to the original wire that was coming out of d2 and into the first of the leds back here let's try it again without that big dodgy wire oh interesting i saw some flickering there again let's see if it behaves any better now so i've just got to say james thank you so much for making this this is awesome it's been it's um it's quite a cool thing in itself but it's also just so interesting to play around with this all right i'm going to change it all to blue yeah see it's actually responding now whereas it wasn't before and i think that that wire that i added all i did was add a wire that goes from the output of the d1 mini going to the input of the chain and the wire was i don't know 400 millimeters long or so and that was enough to stop the d1 mini from being able to communicate with the leds so all i did just then was unsoldered the two ends of that jumper wire and so and reconnected originally where the wire had been and now i can control it again so i can change the brightness and change the colors let me see i'll change it to that see i can change things and it's responding again so it is responding whereas it wasn't before now okay uh but one thing that is interesting if you you can probably see from there that the segments that are flickering do not go all the way to the h they are now only the last few letters so it's now filtering it's only occasionally but it's filtering up to about here sometimes there sometimes up to about here whereas before you saw very distinctly that the effect was coming all the way up here so maybe i wasn't totally insane maybe the the position was changing hmm i gotta take a take a pause for a shot of vodka movie vodka that is you know water [Music] yes okay so jaxtech said it really looks like power glitching after the buck regs [Music] okay so there is a way i can test that it's going to take a little bit of messing around a little bit of soldering i am past time now but i'm going to keep going for a while if you are all right peter lola said hey nice water bottle got any spares aren't yes someone's been to lca um i have i think four of these water bottles thanks to earn it game to continue yes cool okay now so the plan the plan the plan the plan my plan is to remove all of the existing voltage regulators and power the five volt rail off my lab power supply so that i can um uh mike said scope it see if you need to pull up a pull down resistor somewhere down the line um yeah i'll probably i might get to scoping it in fact i might even if this works i might just stick the um this telescope on the data line out of in fact what the hell let's do that just out of curiosity because it's kind of cool to see to see what's going on so i'm going to leave this plugged in and i'm not going to go to the trouble of trying to set up the oscilloscope software right now i'm just going to i don't know i'll point my phone at the screen or something as someone suggested earlier all right so i need myself a ground connection and the data line now where can i pick up ground somewhere handy where where can i grab a ground uh what it's not actually as easy as it sounds [Music] um and i'll just get a bit of the glue off out of the way so i can see more of the pcb oh interesting i can feel it but this pcb is actually quite warm in fact can even pull out this demo camera just just for the fun of it um in fact the end of the board where the problem is occurring is noticeably warmer than the rest of it the pcb is actually quite warm down in that area that is curious all right so where can i get myself some ground all right i need [Music] i'm gonna grab myself a another alligator clip because i'm gonna get ground from somewhere further down the board all right i'm going to take ground off one of these v-regs and take that from there um i will get you all viewing run come on scope run oh i'm seeing data flickering i'll get you a view onto the scope in just a moment i'm just getting things uh kind of vaguely sorted all right so whoa awesome smoke came out that is amazing yo this wire is burning hot look at this that's insulation that's burned off the wire um how on earth did that happen um hmm i gotta stop and think about that one for a moment so i was connecting to i know why just because i wasn't connecting the ground i connected this is funny i connected to the um the five volt rail as the zero as the ground reference for the um the scope probe so there was an actual literal um release of smoke all right uh let's try that again i'm gonna pick up ground from an actual ground point this time and pull data off there okay so um let's see what we've got and whether we can see anything useful on here [Music] oh it actually smells a bit bad oh god um uh okay sorry this is totally uninteresting right now because i've got five volts two volts i'm just messing around with getting there getting some signal on here all right why is that going voltage going so high trigger global 4.7 what um yeah this is not the fun part of the live stream what i can see on the scope here is it looks like there is a data block that is showing up but the voltage on it is unexpectedly high and uh what is going on here i wonder if i killed my pro ball something oh okay another stupid thing my probe switch was in the um in the 1x position and i don't know why they shouldn't ever be in the 1x position and my my scope is calibrated for it on 10x mode so yeah which may be very high voltages on the data line and that explains it all right so now it will start to make a bit more sense i hope um yeah this is not the most interesting i might just switch to changing the power supply over and show switch to showing data later if oh come on if um hang on maybe this is useful now i'm just wasting time now i'm fiddling around with the scope when i should be doing something more productive so i'm going to put that aside so my plan was to remove the voltage regulator modules and feed power directly from the lap supply that's right that's what i was up to all right so what i've got is there is power going into the um the d1 mini from one of these regulator modules in fact easiest way to do this get out the wire cutters i was trying to avoid this but i think this is going to be the simplest thing i'm thinking about grounds here because we also need a ground connection to each of the boards and that is going to go away if i isolate these voltage regulators all right so i think that is okay i can do that so i'm going to isolate that that that and that um sorry james i'm i'm undoing all of your hard work here but this is a quickest way to to see if this is the problem now how much do i want to isolate so there's that all right i'm going to switch to overhead camera just so you can see something of what's going on overhead and where's my little control i need to zoom it zoom zoom zoom zoom all right zoomed okay so you're looking at the back of the sign here so this is the back of the pcbs and these are the voltage regulator modules so power comes in here and it goes to each of these regulator modules and then those modules inject power at different parts of the the site up here is the d1 mini it's a bit turn off the microscope light there we go so that's the d1 mini and that orange no the which one is it the the yellow one so this yellow wire here goes to d2 and that is the dump excuse me the data line that goes into the start of the chain of leds and then these are all power connections so the d1 mini is getting 5 volts off one of these regulators as well so 12 volts comes in here it gets regulated down to um to 5 volts so what i was just doing while you couldn't see it was i've just disconnected the power the outputs these voltage regulators go to these power inputs onto the sign and each of these orange ones is a five volt input and the green ones are ground zero volts so what i was just getting to was i need to see where the d1 mini is getting its power because it still needs power i can't run it without power on that but maybe what i should do so i was going to leave that in place now what i think i'll do is oh there it is so that's the fire box going to the d1 mini so what i'm going to do is isolate every one of these power connections and i'm not going to use this power input at all i'm just going to feed five bolts directly from my lab power supply so that i can so i can see exactly how much current is being drawn and we can you know make sure that it's regulating properly all that sort of thing all right so ground there don't care about that one so ground take that ground out and this one no this is a um it's a bit of a large scale butchering job that i'm doing unfortunately so that one that one that one doesn't matter and i think we are now entirely isolated so we've got a couple of grounds there we've got powers here power here there power there to this one and these are doubled up so in fact you can see how there are two greens there are two oranges they actually just go to the same contact point so what i can do is isolate come on it's just a little bit too short for me to get the wire strippers in there i might have to do it the old-fashioned way no that worked all right so what i'm going to do is strip off connections here didn't get it quite deep enough and link them all together i really only need one on each pcb i think so because each of these goes to the same now that i'm not using the multiple voltage regulators it doesn't matter about all the different injection points i only need a single injection point what i don't know though is whether these go to the same place so let's do a quick test on that i do which means i don't need that one and that is power to the d1 mini so that let's see if that goes through here no all right so this must be ground to the pcb so we want ground oh yeah that'll be it there okay so that and that yep very good all right so that is power to the d1 mini then we've got and it's also ground to this panel we've got ground and ground so we've got three grounds that we need to connect and then we've got four points of power because we have one point of power to each of the panels and power to the d1 mini so um [Music] now this is i'm just thinking about the wire that i'm going to use here i've got horrible skinny little wire if i was going to do this properly i would use something which is reasonably decent but let's take well step one step 0 let's just tin these connections and which one i use that one yep and that one there and there and there okay so i want to jump them all together these ones will reach let's stick those together doing practical stuff like this on camera is kind of a weird thing i haven't even looked at the chat for a while i've got no idea what you're all talking about if anything or if i'm just here talking to myself now which is quite quite possible let's get myself some things to hold this in place what do i use maybe this stick that in there and stick that there it's a little 3d printed soldering jig it's quite handy it's got slots on the side so that you can um insert different thickness of wire and it holds it aligned through now add this one into it bridge from there to one of these and then bridge it around the other way as well am i when i'm doing these live streams my goal basically is to talk and to not stop but it's remarkably hard to do that when you're oh no i've soldered myself into position can i get the jig out with those wires holding together come on unhook unhook you can do it what can i use to get it past that point maybe it's easier if i get this end off first yep that end off and then i can get the jig out all right let's do that and that together oh my stomach is rumbling hopefully you couldn't hear that my stomach is saying what are you still doing at the workbench you need to go and get lunch this oh one on yeah gotta make the joint before i burn my fingers yeah that looks alright it's holding them in position and yeah this little thing it's just a it's a 3d printed sold the jig which is quite handy i just grabbed this design off thingy verse [Music] so i need that and i need this well these ones these two will reach together which means that i can just bridge this to there somewhere now this wire is actually a little bit thin for what i should be using and if this display was being run at full brightness i definitely would not be using just a single strand of wire looped around to try to carry all of the current but what we're trying to do here is not really eliminate a voltage drop situation i'm going to do this that jig won't fit in i need to make strip back a little bit more of this wire yeah we're not trying to eliminate a voltage drop situation in terms of the v-rex not being able to supply enough current the issue is at low levels of illumination when it's not pulling very much at all it didn't want to come off because i'd already timed the end of the wire and it was a bit of solder on it what i'm trying to do is eliminate the vregs as a problem in terms of having multiple regulators connected together possibly a um a dodgy regulator you have to do this without using the jig because it doesn't fit in there and i get everything in the same place at the same time with one hand maybe that is a terrible solder joint but hopefully it'll hang together for long enough all right so we've got a common five volt rail there and you can see that i haven't connected that one or that one but that doesn't actually matter these injection points as i showed on the pcb earlier are all doubled up in fact why did i include that one let's doubled up with this one it's all on the same pcb oh well i was too busy talking not busy enough drinking so let's bridge across the grounds as well and then we can power it off the other supply yeah so as i'm saying the main reason for doing this is just to make sure that it is actually getting a good clean 5 volts even though it's at a low current in case there were some weird issues going on with those regular those those regulator modules all right so i've got ground to there around to there don't care about that i need to connect to there and there these reach each other which means i can do this with just a single piece of wire much nicer so for anyone watching in europe this is probably a ridiculous time of night now some time in the dark o'clock let's just prop those together always stay come on just just stay there for a moment please i can't stand working with loose wires and things i'd much rather be soldering very small parts on a circuit board under a microscope and trying to jump the wires around it's not a fun thing okay we have it in place and uh just for added excitement let's leave all of these joints uncovered and maybe we'll get to let the smoke out again all right so we've got power to there have i got i'm gonna dial up five volts on the lab supply and uh leave what do i do i'll set the current limit to 300 milliamps initially and then i will bring it up slowly so let's see what we've got ground on there five volts on there this is the danger right here these joints are very close together in fact ah let's let's have at least some pretense at trying to keep the angry pixies in the right wire there we go so i'm just going to do it on this side i'm going to turn it on uh turn on the output to the lab sublime and see if any smoke comes out and it has hit the current limit which is interesting okay i'm going to set i set up to 800 milliamps and that's good it has not hit the current limit it's running at 675 milliamps at 5 volts which means that we do not have a dead short and there's no smoke coming out so what i'm going to do now is turn the current limit up to two amps and turn this over well that's interesting interesting so we've got just that coming up there and switch back to wled and try to connect and just see if the d1 mini is even running it may not be it looks like it's not so there is all right what did i get wrong there maybe i don't even have power to the d1 mini let's find out multimeter cables falling all over the place now right let's just see what voltage i've got i need an on-screen multimeter as well i've got five volts going to the d1 mini i've got just confirming this yeah five volts going in there let's check down this end of the chain so we've got ground on this side power on this side five volts go into there but the d1 mini does not appear to be running or at least it hasn't come up on the network which is strange because it definitely has five volt time so hang on i'm going to check it's um its own onboard regulator so see if the 3.3 volt rail is going yeah okay the d1 mini has got 3.3 volt time so why is it not on my wi-fi i wonder if it's done something silly like done itself a factory reset like of the um come on i'm just looking on my phone i'm going to try switching i'll see if that access point has come up maybe the access point isn't visible that's why i couldn't see it on my phone earlier maybe it doesn't advertise so i'm just trying to connect to the default um wled library no no ssid and it does not appear to exist so [Music] all right i'm going to check in my network config where is it unify network control and see if i've got yeah see if that device is up it's been up for 2 minutes 48 seconds that looks correct wled it's on the correct ip address and yet the web interface is not responding hmm what to do now all right i'm going to let that sit for a minute and try and catch up on the chat 0-142 in the uk and electron ash oh 141 am in mordor uh okay i am it's nearly three hours i'm gonna have to oh sorry i'm losing the plot now i really do need to take a break uh so i just saw someone say electron ash does anyone else hear cringe when you hear other youtubers pronounce it [Music] multimeter um but i'm not sure which way around it is i alway i say multimeter i know some people say multimeter is is that the one that makes you cringe uh i've i don't know i've always said it as multimeter because it is two words it's a multi-purpose meter that like that's where the name comes from it is a meter that does multiple things so it's a multimeter but yeah i've i i do hear people call it a multimeter like altimeter which sounds strange yeah matt smith said multimeter that's how i pronounce it too she says well-known fact that no one here in australia knows how to speak english we don't speak english we speak strine ah okay um johnny said you had the current limiter on it boot yeah so i thought maybe oh at boot that is an interesting point because the z1 mini would have powered up and it takes a big gulp of power thank you thank you it takes a big gulp of power in order to initialize its radios yes maybe this is it i i just turned it off and back on again yep and guess what hang on i'm gonna switch cameras that was a um that was a great suggestion uh yeah i did not think about that at all um all right i'm going to switch to the overhead camera i am going to wrap it up pretty soon even though we don't have a solution but we've got some interesting information look at this uh i'm holding it backwards upside down at the moment so it's like right to left instead of left to right but you can see that the last segments are flickering exactly the way they were before now just to explain what was going on a second ago and i think it was matt who suggested the solution to that problem the reason the d1 mini did not come up on the network and it was not working and nothing was running is that when an esp8266 or 32 starts it um has to initialize its radio like when it comes up on wi-fi it initializes the radio and it pulls a big burst of current very briefly and i think it's like 600 milliamps or something like that most of the time it takes less power than that but when it's initializing the radio it takes a fair bit and it does like a an auto tuning process because i had the current limit set low on the lab power supply at the time that the d1 mini started the processor booted and it would have then tried to do its wifi initialization and failed and then even if the d1 mini is running it will still never connect to the wi-fi network so what i had to do was turn the power off and back on again with the higher current limit set and then it initialized came up on the network started running and now i can see it in the user interface so that was a really good catch matt thanks for um suggesting that i think it was matt or was it johnny might have been johnny yes it was johnny bergdahl thank you very much uh yes so in fact i'm going to come back into here change brightness and not that you can see anything oh look you can just see over here well where is it there here you see that blue color that you can see coming just through that is because i just changed it in the user interface if i change it to orange you'll see it comes orange and green so the thing is responding at the moment but we still do have the flickering problem now oh frank say can you please share your wire jig file i definitely will um so it's not actually mine now let's uh i'm gonna pull this up on thingiverse it's one of the items that i've got in my thingyverse collection so [Music] come on thingyverse load you can do it there's a bernie with mittens on thingiverse that's so cool come on uh come on obs switch views switch switch i want desktop there we go here's bernie with mittens we can print him out so no i don't want to sign up i want to sign in because somewhere in my thing yes remember me um somewhere in my list of collected items will be the soldering jig so my collections maybe it's in there um come on collections likes oh it must be in likes what's the difference between collections and likes i don't know well maybe i didn't have it in there in the collection that's odd so let's say soldering i think it was called solder fingers soldering fingers i should be able to find it there it is soldering fingers and there have been a few remixes as well you know i've just clicked on this so what i'll do is i'll drop the link to this one in the chat i'm pretty sure this is the one that soda yeah soldering those americans that like to solder and then check with their multimeters so the yeah this is the one that i printed and there have been a couple of remixes since then and there's this one is interesting uh because this has some holes in the side of it so it's got the normal fingers but it's got holes in the side which mean that you can do things like insert an led into it and then hold the wires in place to solder onto the led so that's um a pretty cool idea let's see different view yeah so it's basically the same thing it's just got those holes added which could be handy in some situations but that's not the one i printed i printed the the original one and oh here's another one need oh this is funny uh this other one that i'm just opening now because everybody forgets to put the heat shrink on before they do before they sold the wires together so this is the version with the holes in it but it's got the text added need heat shrink as a reminder so when you're sitting there staring at your joint um as you're soldering it it'll it'll remind you to put the heat shrink on first so that one i'm going to drop this one into the chat as well but now you know what you're looking for you can easily find these um oh electronics my brother and i had an argument recently about how i say almond do you say almond or almond i always say it and say the l is silent just almond like as if it was like a h m o and d almond but i know many people say almond [Music] okay almond yeah almond yeah yeah i say it the same way that matt does what am i doing i'm talking about the pronunciation of almond i am so far off the reservation that it is time to call an end to this um and andy sent me a message saying uh the bribe was only for 40 minutes it's now been an hour and 40 minutes yeah i'm gonna stop all right so did we never even got into arduino lent at all but it's been fun anyway i'm tempted to leave this sign and not do any more debugging on it until i'm back on a live stream unless that'd be too boring uh maybe i should just do some poking around on it and see if i can figure out the problem and then just tell you at the end what it is because debugging can end up taking a lot of time at least i didn't break the internet yeah that's right adam uh so do i don't i i don't know i think about that maybe i'll have a look at debugging or diagnosing the problem off camera and then tell you the result otherwise maybe if i haven't got to it in the next week i might bring it back out on the next live stream and keep debugging it don't know mitchell said next week live stream yeah all right it could just be a whole lot of uh you watching me soldering and trying things so it's not necessarily very interesting yep okay i will go now and i will tell my stomach that i have something on the way for it all right so thanks everybody um and matt it's like two o'clock in the morning now so go to bed someone else was saying it was two o'clock as well i'm gonna call it and say goodbye for another week thanks for hanging out with me you've actually made me feel a whole lot better than i was at the start of the live stream so thank you very much and i'm going to try a stain switch and see if it ends bye you

Channel: SuperHouseTV

Views: 7,734

Rating: 4.8504672 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: qj6xznyi0YM

Length: 180min 34sec (10834 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 06 2021