I have an ESP8266 driving a neopixel string, that has worked flawlessly for over six months now, but since 2023.4.0 it becomes randomly unavailable and restarts in the off state usually, but in some instances I have to power-cycle the device.
The logs are completely useless as they don’t give any useful information, but I have observed that this issue only happens when the color of the LEDs is not static.
To determine if it is a hardware or firmware issue I have tested over brightness and effects, and the only one that is stable is the static color regardless of brightness.
I have not changed the firmware in months, and the change log doesn’t mention changes regarding the addressable_light/display component.
In the Discord channel one user posted about this issue a few days ago but was ignored.
I have flashed up to 2023.4.2, but the bug persists.
Is there a solution to this?
A month has passed since I posted about this issue. I have applied all of the updates that have been made available by ESPhome, but the issue still persists.
It is quite clear that ESPhome warms that updates are available even when the updates are not relevant. This should be considered a(nother) bug.
It is also evident that the EPShome community on this forum is non existent.
Another month has passed. Now the Neopixel part seems to have been fixed, but a new bug has appeared. The E.131 part is no longer working.
I just wish the code owners/maintainers stopped messing around with it.
I would like to point out that since this thread was started, I haven’t changed the code, I have only flashed the updates.
It is 2024, the months have gone by but the bug persists. None of the contributors have replied, showing that they really don’t care. At this point this post has become my solo log of issues, and I am considering stopping the subscription to HA, as the payments only seem to go towards useless features, such a new and updated logo.
Meanwhile I have created a rule that bypasses the issue and restarts the light when it becomes unavailable. The E1.31 protocol is still not functional.
Sounds like a power issue to me, especially if it mainly happens when the LEDs are animated and thus the power draw is fluctuating. Could be the power supply or if you’re powering them off the board, it might be more than it can reliably handle.
Random disconnects or becoming unavailable usually indicate a power supply issue. The fact that you’ve let this problem persist for months and continue to come here and moan about what your certain is a bug with Neopixel. Ive seen no mention of troubleshooting youve done to rule out wiring or hardware issues. I see no mention of trying the obvious fix and thats to switch to FastLED. That will tell you if its a neopixel bug for sure or not. Everything youve wrote wreaks of self entitled whiner and im not surprised no one is jumping through hoops to help you. Lastly, youre threat of canceling HA because they keep messing with the code and breaking it. You dont even know what your talking about. It’s Arduino that keeps changing and updating. Since Neopixel, FastLED and Esphome are built on Arduino, they have to keep things upgraded and able to work with all the new changes coming from Arduino. You arent even assigning blame to the right people in your moaning.
Thank you for your kind reply,
Power was the first thing I though of, but the power-supply is an extremely unlikely issue, as there is a 4A power supply, and the max consumption of the LED strip at full brightness is less than half that. Even in the likelihood that fast transients were the cause, additional bulk capacitance was added when the circuit was built to ensure this would not be a problem.
In fact the circuit has been working perfectly for over a six months using mostly the animations without a single drop-out. This only started to happen after 2023.4.0 hence the blame on this release and the the following ones.
In the end the solution was to switch to WLED instead of ESPhome.
It has worked flawlessly for a couple of months now, plus WLED has some amazing effects. together with LEDFX it is truly a great improvement.
If all you’re doing is controlling LEDs, then yeah, WLED is the far superior option. Only reason to use ESPHome to do that is if you want/need the same device to also do other things.