OctoWS2811 flickering and glitching

AleMonti

Member
I was trying out the parallel outputs of the OctoWS2811 library on my old setup before upgrading it, but during my tests, I noticed that one of the strips flickers and glitches badly. It currently runs fine with WS2812Serial and FastLED, but as I want to expand the project to 16 strips and improve the refresh rate I need to switch over to OctoWS2811.

I'm testing 5 strips of 256 LEDs each with the Teensy4_PinList sketch. The pins are 14, 17, 20, 24, and 29, the same ones used for WS2812Serial.
My issue is that the strip on pin 20 is glitching. I suspect it has to do with the quality of the signal since the affected strip is the one with the longest data line, about 3m. All the others, which are under 2m, are not affected.
But I'm confused, how do WS2812Serial and FastLED manage to light up the strip correctly but OctoWS2811 fails, given the identical physical setup? Maybe different timings? Switching from WS2811_GRB to WS2812_GRB in the OctoWS2811 controller config doesn't improve things. The data line is of course being pulled up to 5V through a 74HCT245 and terminated with a resistor. The strips are WS2812B.

I fear that once I rework and upgrade the project I will be dealing with similar issues on all strips, as the new setup will have data lines run through a 100ohm resistor, 5m of ethernet cabling plus around 1-3m of 22AWG cable.


TL;DR: WS2812B strips with a 3m data line don't light up correctly with OctoWS2811, but work fine with WS2812Serial and FastLED.

Any ideas on what could be happening and how to fix it?
 
Update:
I've done more testing and actually, it's not that particular strip having issues. The weird behavior happens only if I set up more than 1 pin.
With one strip it works as expected, but any more, 2, 3, 4, 5... it goes crazy. Some strips work, and some flash random colors. Also, and this is pretty strange, some of the strips that are physically connected but not initialized in software kinda work, even if they should be off.
I'm using Teensy 4.1, the Teensy4_PinList sketch, and the latest version of OctoWs2811 directly from GitHub.
I'm going crazy over this, does anyone have a clue on what may be going on?
 
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