Ghost in the Machine

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CVierhout

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Hi everyone. I'm a long time Arduino user and have built a ton of projects with them but last month I was helping a friend with a project for Burning Man that required a song playlist to be played plus cutting to recorded sound effects and recorded stories. The project also ran three simple LED animations over like 300 pixels. I use FastLED and this was about the simplest LED stuff I'v done in years. So the request for the sound effects and stories popped up like two weeks before we where to head to the desert to display the art project. So teensy 3.2 and the audio board to the rescue. Well not so fast. I quickly watched all the videos on the audio card, did a few test projects and ported all my code over. It wasn't long at all to get everything working in the teensy. But then I noticed that with the wav files would place from the SD card the LEDS would only update like maybe the first 30 pixels. Ok, this was like a week to head out so I grabbed an UNO and moved the LED stuff to it and ran a wire between the teensy and uno so the teensy could tell the uno when to play one of the animations. That was work around one. So all this time I had the usb port to the computer plugged in. Once I pulled the cord and packed up the project to take it our shared work space the teensy started not booting. What I found was that if I booted the teensy with the usb cable plugged in and then turned on the 5vdc power supply then pulled the usb the teensy would run. Now on that 5vdc line was 4 LED strips and the uno. They all run just fine and the meter showed that the 5vdc was right on the mark. Ok, maybe the 5vdc wasn't coming up clean. I haven't checked with my oScope yet. So I added a filter cap on the 5vdc line and it might be helping some but not 100%. It's like i plug the thing in and all the power, I have 24vdc, 12vdc, and 5vdc in the project, and the LEDS and uno comes up but the teensy doesn't. If I turn the power off for like 10 seconds and repower the project the teensy boots. double powering up is work around two. The last little thing that is happening is like once every minutes or so a weird squealing, ghostly sound can be heard low in the audio. This happens with or without any of the 3 audio inputs playing. input one, passthru, input two the sound effect wav file, input three is the stories wav files. I would love to figure out what's up with all three of these and I guess the most important would be the boot problem, followed but the squeal and then the pixel update issue. I did adjust the number of buffers to see if that was the issue with the pixel updates. I should say that at the moment I don't have a test set of the teensy and the audio board and the project is due to head to another event in two weeks so I'll be buying a bench set and a spare set soon. You always need spares when you're showing a project in the desert for a week. Lastly, I know I haven't posted the code yet. I don't have it with me at the moment and it's like 38 pages printed out.

Charlie.
 
Any update or way to express more details on the project/problem and repro code without 38 pages of code?

Photos might help - my first guess with little idea as to why was a power issue with GND or something halting the T_3.2 function. No update on O-scope details.

Also what version of IDE and TeensyDuino.

Paul has supported some complex builds for burning man and other - there could be a simple conflict not apparent from the text presented in OP.
 
Thank you again. I'll get some video when I can. The project is off to another BM event this weekend. I will be buying another Audio board for a new touch interactive BM project that I'm just starting. Beside the boot issue, I can work around the LED problem for small projects by running the animations on a UNO or Mega and using a signal between it and the teensy. Kind of technical duct tape but it got the last project running for the playa.

Thanks again for your help. And I don't mind uploading all the code but I have 7 creative projects in the works at the moment and really don't have time right now to cut the code back to a test set. All really is 3 leds stands, a motor driver that runs a pair of actuators, a button pin, and 3 audio soft mixers. It only gets weird when playing the wav files from the SD card.
 
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