Problems with "always on" leds on Blinkt?

Support
1

Hi,

if a led on the blink-strip is always on, does this cause problems (e.g. reduced lifetime)?

Thanks, Bernhard

2

You mean one you’ve specifically instructed to turn on? Or is it coming on by itself at startup (sometimes happens due to noise getting interpreted as signal)?

3

Imagine the following scheme: Blinkt will show the current temperature, with e.g. 8 leds=23° down to 1 led=16° (additional ranges implemented with additional colors). So the least significant leds will always be on. Can I expect problems with such an implementation?

4

Not at all, the chances of you making a significant impact on the lifetime of the LEDs is slim! It may start to wear out in around 5, 10 or 20 years if something else doesn’t fail first.

5

How do I turn the LEDs off? I tried a little code that said:

import blinkt
blinkt.clear()

but it didn’t switch them off.

6

You could always use blinkt.set_clear_on_exit(), or if that fails, just set the RGB of the LEDs to 0 like so: blinkt.set_all(0, 0, 0).

7

Thanks very much. I tried blinkt.set_clear … but either I got it wrong or
it didn’t work.

Of course setting everything to 0 is good.

Thanks,

Anne

In a message dated 21-Jul-17 3:56:03 P.M. GMT Daylight Time,
pimoroni@discoursemail.com writes:

 _RaspberryPicardBox_ (http://forums.pimoroni.com/u/raspberrypicardbox)

July 21

You could always use blinkt.set_clear_on_exit(), or if that fails, just
set the RGB of the LEDs to 0 like so: blinkt.set_all(0, 0, 0).

8

Don’t forget blinkt.show().

blinkt.clear() does not implicitly call show, just in case you want to set some pixels after clearing the display.

1 Like
9

You are so right gadgetoid. This was how I solved it:

from blinkt import set_pixel

for pixel in range(8):

    r = 0
   g = 0
   b = 0
  set_pixel(pixel, r, g, b)
  show()

The indenting doesn’t show and I don’t know how to put that right.

10

In order to indent any code you might post, simply put three back ticks ``` at the beginning and the end of your code. For example:

#```
code here...
#```

Forget the hashes, I just needed to comment them out to stop early termination. :)