I might have goofed.. mote pHat flickers

Support
1

Hi, I recently purchased a mote phat, soldered the female header on and hooked it all up.

I installed the Pimoroni Dashboard and all went well, grabbed the examples for motephat, worked.

I ran some of them and they seemed okay.

I have the RGB/White sticks… so I wanted to set every other pixel (white) or (rgb) so I did this

#1/usr/bin/env python
import motephat
import time

motephat.set_brightness(1)
num_pixels = 16

motephat.configure_channel(1, num_pixels, False)
motephat.configure_channel(2, num_pixels, False)
motephat.configure_channel(3, num_pixels, False)
motephat.configure_channel(4, num_pixels, False)

motephat.clear()

for channel in range(1, 5):
for pixel in range(num_pixels):
if pixel % 2 == 0:
motephat.set_pixel(channel, pixel, 255, 0, 0)
if pixel % 2 != 0:
motephat.set_pixel(channel, pixel, 255, 255, 255)

motephat.show()

Anyway, it’s all wonky and all sorts of colors show up, sometimes a channel will be off, and if I touch the mote phat at all or anything it freaks out and starts shifting colors and pixels on and off. Have I damaged the phat? or is my code all wrong? Please assist.

2

Is there any other code running on your Pi that could be interfering with Mote pHAT?

Also you should change: motephat.show() to something like:

while True:
    motephat.show()
    time.sleep(0.001)

Since the Mote strips contain “Intelligent” pixels, they’re subject to external noise being interpreted as signal. If you touch them, or a coupled-in signal from your environment is strong enough, then there’s a high probability that signal will be interpreted as data. This will result in the sort of weirdness you describe!

3

Thanks for the reply. Changed what you suggested and moved the mote strips… they were next to my Qi charger and I think that was part of it. All of this has helped.