The Problem With NeoPixels (and The Cube)

all right guys I said I would update you on this neopixel Cube thing once I got it to a stable place and that's kind of where I am now I'm using my camera freehand so if it Wiggles around a bit that's what it is anyway um so I ran into a problem other than it's really hard to film neopixels and make them look right they just don't look right on camera uh but anyway this thing it it works as it should it's a you know of course it's a little bit slow but let me show you what the problem was okay or the evolution of the problem so if you remember years ago um I got one of these that I used for uh a project with Ben 64 pixels right and so we did that and I thought hey that's real cool and then I found these tiny little neopixels and I thought ah you know I got to do this so I made one of these uh that replace this so that that's 64 there and then I thought well oh actually what I did is I put uh four of these together and I made a panel and a display that my daughter actually has now I don't have it anymore um and so I said hey well I'll just make some panels with uh you know the size of four of these so that's 256 on there and I thought well if that's good then um you know let's make a cube out of it and so I've got five of these panels and that's where you start running into problems because that is a total of um what um 12 1280 it's 1,80 neopixels so what you'll see one thing is that that's moving it as fast as I can make it move right now scrolling text because when you're sending out the you know the data to 12200 1280 of those things it takes a long time for it to update so I mean the maximum update I can get is about 24 frames a second which you know it's good for worms uh like that uh but for the text and other stuff it's not so good but that's not really the the main problem the big problem is heat if you put your hands on this thing it's noticeably hot even just sitting around this thing gets warm even when there's no lights on it gets warm okay so what I've done is I've hooked it up to this meter um let's see I've got I've got the USB that runs it comes out right here and uh then I've got it run into the wires and then back around to the meter and we can watch what's going on so here's our voltage and here's our amperage that's Watts right there all right so just not doing hardly anything it's running a full amp pulling out of there and the when I originally started trying to program this thing I was trying to run it off of uh this setup right here into the esp32 I kept having brown outs and then I finally realized hey this thing's drawing a lot of current and it turns out these things even when they're turned off they draw nearly uh a milliamp of power even when they're turned off so um you know this much of this is just each one of these neopixels the processor and each one of these neopixels running so anyway this is the cube this is what it does so far it puts the time up there uh it makes worms and it makes those lines go up so it it's been pretty problematic to program because it's like it goes uh you know this panel this panel all the way around and then this panel is connected to that panel back there it's so this is the fifth panel you have to reorient everything so you got to figure out what are you going to do you know when this worm comes up over the top then he's he jumps from you know this panel all the way around to there you know so it's kind of tedious uh but anyway that's kind of what it does but what I did was since I got this thing set up I I wrote some software so that we can just do a quick test and see what the amperage draw on this thing can be and why it gets so hot and why you have to plan for some serious amperage to run through this I mean we could probably easily melt these wires if we wanted to so I'm going to put this thing on the tripod and I'm going to set up the program for testing okay so we're sitting here this is Idle still warm you'll see that we're running at 1 amp with this thing just sitting here idle the esp32 is not going to be pulling more than about you know 30 milliamps doing what it's doing which is just sitting idle it's probably pulling only about 15 okay and uh so all of this is just the processors in each one of these neopixels running on their own consuming power a little less less than a mill amp per neopixel okay so now each of these lights we're going to turn on white because that will illuminate the red the green and the blue uh LED inside of these uh so we're going to turn on white and then what we're going to do is increase it one level at a time so you know that for each uh color there's 256 levels that we can go to all right so we're going to we're going to go up one at a time and then we're going to watch this amperage right here go up and I'm going to I got the amperage turned all the way up I think this is a 10 amp power supply we're not going to go that way far because it'll melt our wires but let's just watch how low level we go before something happens all right so we're at zero right now we're doing one app all right that's level one so we went up about 100 100 150 amp milliamps level two another 100 150 milliamps level three level four level five so this is five out of 256 we're not even at 10% yet so it's starting to that's not too hot let me feel the wire now we're okay so we're we're running 2 amps we're getting some weird stuff all right two let me see what we're at now we're at uh we're at 11 all right uh-oh getting some weird stuff up there on the top that's the last neopixel or last screen so let's see all right there we go we are at 23 so we're right at 10% of what what we could do and we're pulling almost 3 amps and that's getting pretty warm let me fill my wire yeah my wire is starting to get warm too because this USB wire is not supposed to pull that amount of amperage let's see we'll go let's go it's all it's getting whacked now I don't know what's going on all right we're going to call it on that one let's see yeah okay we're going to call all right so that is the end of our test and we'll just going back up to um back to the regular routine so there you go I'm pretty much done with this Cube I I don't know how much more time I'm going to spend programming it it it's just tedious um and man it just draws uh too much power to be sitting around running all the time all right that's about it

Channel: Clayton Darwin

Views: 2,619

Keywords: DIY, Homemade, esp32, neopixels, micropixels, rgb, led, display, cnc, robotics

Id: 7NTDygfA3Jg

Length: 9min 9sec (549 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 06 2024