RGB strip light issue

[Skymaster]

View attachment 26990

so it's hard to know exactly what is old and what is new.

Looking at the above, there are a few differences I can see

New strip is wider
Data pin font direction 90 degrees rotated
Font on old looks marginally larger too

 

[cam080]

I ended up trying a few different strips and narrowed it down to the 2 strips that had the same style of font on them that were giving me issues. I soldered different strips on and they worked first time.
Really weird, every other strip I soldered on to the first working section worked fine, but for some unknown reason the 2 with that different font didn't work. They both checked out with the multimeter totally fine, even worked out where the data in and data out was going in and out of the 2811 chip, and it matched the other portion of the strip.
I threw them away just so I don't try and use them again.

Thanks all for the suggestions, I was so close to scrapping lights altogether this year, so much has been going wrong.

 

[Juddge]

sounds like you made the right decision. Good work.

 

[Skymaster]

I ended up trying a few different strips and narrowed it down to the 2 strips that had the same style of font on them that were giving me issues.

My guess is that these strips have slightly different signal timings to the rest of them, making them slightly incompatible.

Can you confirm what chip is actually on the board? A close up photo would help.