[Summary] Over the course of several hours, my dongle 'transmit' LED would no longer light up. After troubleshooting why the dongle would not 'transmit' I recalled the LED was a little brighter when I started, and a little dimmer after several hours use. Turns out the LED had died and simply would no longer flicker. Replacement with a new LED restored the transmit indication.
After that, I found I could use the SSC program utility and get the strings to flash white indicating they were programmed, but could not get vixen output to the strings - even though the dongle indicated transmitting. I set up Vixen on a separate computer and got the exact same result which seemed to point back to the hardware. Looking at the Hub, I found the top row of solder joints had been missed.
I resoldered those and found the strings still wouldn't light - so I went back and re-ran the SSC set-up utility. Same flashing result, though the string would then see output from pixelnet and work fine [/summary]
Ok - DHL dropped a box off at the door today...couple of 4m flex strips to test with. Got my boards all soldered up a few days ago and been working on setting everything up, programming, etc today. After a bit of a learning curve, I think I have everything programmed, but no blinky...
So far, I've set up hub, programmed the PIC, then set up the SSC's, programmed the PIC's with the test hex and used the utility to set them up for a 120 channel LED strip. Then I get the R, G, B, W color cycle. I then programmed the SSC with the latest HEX for full operation. When I play a sequence in Vixen, I see the green light blink on the dongle, but the strips don't blink
In troubleshooting, I found I had put the top row of 485 chips on the hub in backward
, so I flipped them. Still no blinky. Then it dawned on me that I probably need to use the set-up utility again after switching from test to operational hex on the PIC (?) So I did that. Still no blinky.
About this time, I noticed the green LED on the dongle was no longer blinking when I would play a sequence, though the red power LED comes on when plugged in. At one point, I accidentally plugged the dongle into a hub out (Too many blue cat 5 cords running around!) Though I don't recall that as the specific moment when the dongle quit transmitting.
So far, I've double checked the port settings, and the PIC programming on the dongle. all seem to be fine and unchanged from when I was able to program the SSC's for the 120 node strip.
Does the LED show actual 'connection' status to the hub or just 'transmitting' from the dongle?
If I power up the dongle with the test jumper set, should I see the green LED blinking?
I've looked at the traces on the board, it doesn't seem as though plugging in a 'hub out' into the dongle input would cause an issue...would it?
Any thoughts appreciated!