Dud Strips

Goliath

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Dec 31, 2014
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I bought a fair number of cheap 12V 2811 strips a few years ago. 14 of them have been sitting in the original packaging in a box on the shelf. I pulled them out today, three work, 11 just go white (some steady, some flickering).
Are they stuffed, or is there something I can try to resurrect something from them?
 

Goliath

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Are you sure you're feeding data into the correct end?

They may have been spooled onto the reel backwards?
My very word, yes. I got the seller to fit the sockets and plugs, and the directional arrow indicates they did it right.
 

Goliath

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I’ve had a little play with a strip today.
I cut the first and last pixels off to remove the influence of any potential bad soldering. Made no difference.
I lowered the intensity setting right back to 5% in the Advatek assistant. This made no apparent difference to the intensity of light output from the strip, but it did seem to now receive the colour being sent from the controller, although still flickering badly.
Any clues?

Unrelated but look at these! (third row)
Thingiverse.com
 

Goliath

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Well it's been a puzzling afternoon. I plugged one of the working strips in, with a dodgy one plugged into it, and both damn well worked!
Plugging the dodgy one directly into the controller, and it just lit straight up to white when the power was turned back on. Now the controller won't work. I've changed ports on the Pixlite LR, I've changed receiver boards in the controller, I've changed pigtails. Only thing left to change is the network cable.
I did take the dodgy strip to an unused output on another controller, and it misbehaved there too.
 

Mark_M

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Dec 30, 2018
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Christmas Light world
Plugging the dodgy one directly into the controller, and it just lit straight up to white when the power was turned back on. Now the controller won't work.
Sounds to me like the data line is short circuited to the 12v power.

Don't keep blowing ports on your controller!
 
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