MADRIX Forum

Hello,
I'm running 12 RGB strips, 170 fixtures/1 universe each, 3 strings per Nebula port on 2 nebulas. It's been working fine till one of the 3 string legs on a certain port of the nebula all started flickering and glitzing unless I put a strong signal to it- but it will not blackout. The connection between the Nebula and the LED is less than .5 meters (maybe about 6 inches), they're all power injected at the end of each LED string, and I've played with the output (it's on the correct one that was working correctly before). This just randomly started happening while playing in the patch editor. I've tried close out, shut off, power off etc. and the lights will go dark until I open up madrix, then they start going crazy again no matter the patch I use. I can't figure out why they're doing this... please help! Thanks!

Hello Kaleb,
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In your explanation it seems that the problem occurs only on one of the 12 stripes.
In that case I think there is a problem of the stripe respectively of the first pixel/LED of the used stripe.
So you could cut off the first pixel and try it again.
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If the problem occurs on every third of your 12 stripe it seems to be a power problem. That means it could be that the used power supply will not deliver enough voltage or current.

I did some troubleshooting with the vendor who sold them to me and by trying each LED strip separately we did manage to isolate the problem to one strip. It was the first of a string of 3 LED strips, once I removed it from the line the other 2 worked just fine. The last third of the problem strip is what lights up/flickers/freaks out. I was just going to send it back to the vendor for a replacement, hadn't considered trying to cut out a single faulty pixel. Do you have any more advice about how to isolate the bad pixel on a faulty string? How would you know (as you've suggested) to just cut out the first pixel on the LED string?

Thanks for the feedback and help! Love your program it's a work of beauty and wonder.

Hello Kaleb,
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In case of intelligent LED stripes it is everytime hard to say where the problem of the stripe is located. Normally the first LED/chip is damaged where the problem starts. If the porblem occurs on the whole string, mostly the first pixel is damaged. Of course there could be other problems like short circuit on the end of the stripe and so on which you will not find with these method.
Another possibility to test is to feed the power and data not at the first pixel rather on a feed point after the first pixel.