OMG, thought my flex strings were all bad

[taybrynn]

They were only lighting up half way, only lighting up one node and light up part with with a node at the end blinking....

...

panic set in ... OMG, there nodes say tm1809 ... checked rays site, ok, thats normal/ok

...

still not working, whats going on?

...

wires getting really hot, oh no !!!!

....

turns out that I didn't trim the wires off on the end of the string, and they must have been making contact, causing
all sorts of nasty problems ... lucky I didn't blow them up.

...

so they all work now

Moral of the story: trim off the ends of your flex strings and seal them up ... if they touch, bad things WILL happen and
will make your flex strings appear to be bad !!!

I was about to send them back, when I realized the ends might be touching (just how they came from factory) ... and sure enough,
that was the problem on all the strips!


Ahhhh ... peace returns

[jeffcoast]

It would be nice if we could daisy chain these, but since we can't Ray should just not put a wire on that end and just seal the end up. Does anyone know if daisy chaining is even possible with other controllers with these strips?

[jnealand]

Sealing up the wire ends of the node strings is also needed.  I blew a fuse on the hub because I was not paying attention when I first started.  I didn't want to cut the ends off yet since I may be splicing nodes in and out as I do burn in and troubleshooting.  So I put a piece of blue painters tape face up, splay the 3 wires apart, press the ends on the tape and then fold the tape back over the wire ends so they cannot touch, but I can take the tape off if I need to splice nodes on the end as I troubleshoot problems.  One of the beauties or uglies of SS is that you can make the string length exactly fit the element that you are putting them on.  Until I get the ladder out and get up on the roof I can only estimate the length of strings I need for each of my roof ridges.  All will be under 128 nodes, some under 100.  Same with my windows.  I originally estimated (based on the wiki info) a 50 node string would do the window job.  Then after getting the strings in house and measuring them I estimated 75 nodes.  I built a PVC window frame and it only took 63 nodes.  Now I am going to make my window frames a little larger and will probably need between 65 and 68 nodes.  So much to do and the time is marching on.