Graham and I got together and fixed the flickering problem with the LEDs. We both initially suspected it was a coding issue, but after digging through the code thoroughly we decided that it could possibly be hardware related. We found that switching power supplies resolved the problem. The specific difference between the power supplies is hard to pin down but we will hopefully not to deal with it much.
Last week I started talking to Daniel Garcia who develops the FastSPI library and worked on troubleshooting the library. He figured out the problem the code but wasn’t ready to push his changes, as there are still bugs in his current version of the code. I waited for a while but he hasn’t pushed the new code yet. Since we can’t work with the FastSPI library right now with our given LED strip, it will probably be advantageous to just use the previous code that works. If we want to use the FastSPI library we should get a strip that works really well with it such as the LPD8806. They are a bit more expensive but work well and offer a higher refresh rate, which means smooth changes. More info on the LPD8806 can be found here.
Since then I’ve continued working on animating the strip using the old code. I’m not sure if I’ll be using serial to control the colors eventually but I’m experimenting with that so that others could interface with it from different platforms more easily for prototyping. More updates will come shortly 🙂
