Faulty programming of blinksticks

Support
#1

Dear support staff,
I recently ordered 10 x Blinkstick pro devices which arrived last week.

They do not appear to have been programmed correctly.

I downloaded the Blinkstick Client app from your website to control an addressable RGB LED from Digikey and found that pin ‘R’ (data-out) is only active when the Test screen “PULSE” button is clicked. The signal however is not the correct timing waveform specified for addressable LEDs such as the Neopixel that the Blinkstick devices are meant to control.
The waveform is a digital output 0-5V which sweeps from a mark-space ratio of 1 to about 500 over a period of seconds. This has the effect of turning the LED from its initial state of blue to white, it is not possible to program the colour by selecting from the screen palette and clicking the "set colour’ button.
A previously purchased Blinkstick does however operate correctly - unfortunately, all of the recently purchased devices do not operate correctly and I am wondering if you have received other complaints from customers with similar problems.
I would like to exchange the recently purchased devices for correctly programmed Blinksticks.

Thanks,

#2

Hi Russel,

Did you swith to mode 2 for Pro? You can find more details about modes here:

https://www.blinkstick.com/help/tutorials/blinkstick-pro-modes

#3

I advised the programmer writing the code for our application, he advised that he sets the mode once the application is launched. I have a shell that allows me to set the mode on startup but still no joy.
I downloaded your new Blinkstick client version 2 and was able to change the colour of one of the addressable LEDs connected, set up the client for 2 LED’s but made no difference, colour is not the same as specified, selecting RED gives me GREEN, GREEN gives RED, BLUE gives BLUE, YELLOW gives YELLOW, other colours using RED/GREEN combinations are of course not correct.
Overall it shows the device is working, I exited from the blinkstick client and ran the code written by our programmer, the LED is colour sequencing OK so it appears he is not initializing the device into the correct mode.
thanks for your help.

#4

“The Programmer” here, we’ve resolved the problem :grinning:

I was calling SetMode before OpenDevice, as per the example code here.

When called in that order SetMode has no effect, so setting colours only worked on the one BlinkStick we have that was already in mode 2.

I’ve updated the example on your wiki so that SetMode is called after OpenDevice.

#5

Hey Joh,

please keep in mind, that the mode of the stick is stored in the EEPROM. Even if the EEPROM has enough write cycles, you should check with a GetMode if the mode is already the right one. If not you can set it. In the example it writes the mode every time, even if it is already mode 2.

Just an idea :slight_smile:

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