LED Matrix artifacts

[jekader]

Hi everyone, I'm working on porting PixelIt to ESP32-C3 and so far it's looking good.
Using the awesome MicroMatrix and the boot logo is rendered perfectly, however later I see some artifacts:

The settings are:

• startup brightness: 2
• auto brightness: off
• clock color: #00FF00 (green)
• clock auto fallback: 30 seconds, no animation
• LED matrix pin: D2

Has anyone stumbled across similar glitches before? Some of my theories are:

• insufficient power, however the boot logo prints without issues
• timing issues
• something else using the pin and corrupting the data stream

Any advice welcome before I get the soldering iron out.

[foorschtbar]

What you could try to figure out if it is a hardware or software issue:

• 1000uF cap between 5V and GND
• external 5V/2A power supply
• Generic ESP8266 with default PixelIt pins
• NeoPixel test sketch

[jekader]

Thanks for the advice. After some more tests looks like it is something specific to FastLED on ESP32-C3, there's a bug reported upstream for quite a while: FastLED/FastLED#1349

When setting MATRIX_PIN=8 to send control signals to the built-in blue LED, I still see it flickering even when a static text gets displayed and no LED refresh should take place. Might be signal interference from Bluetooth/WiFi, will keep on digging.

[Linjieqiang]

LGTM

[Linjieqiang]

Hello @jekader , how to test it? I have an ESP32-mini board, but I'd like to get the firmware and test it

[jekader]

Go ahead and clone this branch and build it with PlatformIO for ESP32-C3:
https://github.com/jekader/PixelIt/tree/esp32c3

This should work and reproduce the issue (flicker on wifi activity due to single-core delays), so change line 153 of platformio.ini to fastled/FastLED (remove version), then rebuild and reupload to confirm the issue is fixed.

[Linjieqiang]

Good, let me try