Help with Seed Pixel and WLED voltage\power issue

[Phil262]

Hi All

Hoping for some help. Decided to start dipping my toes into some of the smart lighting side of things this year, generally just have loads of simple plug in lights.

So bought some seed pixels and controllers from Ali Express (Ray Wu's store)

Got a couple of Gedopto WLED ESP32 controllers.
plus some LED Strips, both 12v and 5v
and 1000 12v seed pixels. (2.5cm spacing, 12V, 8.5MA)

Got WLED working and tested plugging in the 5V and 12V power supplies i had. Both worked fine with the LED strips.
Was even able to power up the 1000 light string and got colours working, changing etc though WLED.

Then experimented with Xlights and got a basic sequence working on the 12V strip, using the GPI016 port. Everything looking good, so decided start experimenting with the props i wanted to make.

Measure up what I needed and it came out to 93 pixels per string. Cut 2 lengths, wired them up and connected them to some terminal Waygo type connectors. Plugged into the GPI02 port. (left the strip off)

This is where it went wrong.....

1 light in the first string popped and let the smoke of doom out. some of the lights still worked, just random ones and only showing red.
Original had 2 strings connected to same connectors. Then tried just one and got the same result and nice little burn mark on my desk lol.

Electronics is not my strong suit sadly. I tried experimenting with different power settings and limiting in the WLED controller but wasn't able to get anything other than the same random red lights.

I'm hesitant to cut up more of the lights until i understand what happened better.

Not sure whether the current strings will still work and just have a dead pixel (just for testing) or if I need to cut out the bad one. Didn't label it though so... But they do both still power on.

I've tried looking for some sort of calculator to help work out what power settings i should set in WLED for a string of a given length. But haven't found anything.

Happy to post any pics or other useful info, don't want to give up and would be a shame to not e able to use them this year as did have some specific props I wanted to build out.

Anyone able to point me in the right direction?

Thanks.

 

[merryoncherry]

For the smoke to come out, it was not connected correctly or the wrong voltage was supplied. (It's not a power setting or anything else WLED or software.) Reference to the pixels used and photos of how it is connected usually help diagnose.

 

[thewanderingpine]

if the 12V PSU worked with the 12V strip and popped the "12V seed pixel" -- is it possible Ray mislabelled his seed pixels and shipped you a 5V one? Are they 3 wire or 4 wire seeds? Are you sure they were wired correctly? Got a photo?

 

[Phil262]

Please see below images of setup.

Controller and PSU


Seed Pixels


Controller wired up with 1 string and then 2 strings, get no lights at all now.


Testing just now i swapped 1 strings ground and Voltage wires around. Popped another light.

Smells great in here now, lol.

You might be onto something with the 5V, plugged in my 5V supply and nothing popped this time.
Lights are a bit dimmer, cant get the controller to do anything to them though. Not sure if thats due to damage or mis configured settings. Current WLED settings are below.

 

[merryoncherry]

Are there little white dots on one of the conductors of the string? To me, based on the larger bulges on the LED side of the string, it looks like these are not attached with the same polarity, so one must be reversed? But some little white dots would make this clearer.

 

[Phil262]

Can confirm there white dots on one side of the cable. Both of these currently go into the V port on the controller and some of the lights turn on when under 5V.
Do you think the damaged lights are why i cant get the controller to control them or still missing some other setting or wrong voltage etc.