Mote phat, only one channel

Support
1

Hi, I’ve just assembled the Mote Phat and installed it on an RPi 3 running Pixel. I bought two Mote LED strips but no connectors, so I’m using the red micro USB cable that came with the BBC microbit kit and a shim I bought for one of my pi zeros. For the other Mote I’m using a standard micro USB cable and another shim. So, I’m trying the various python example scripts and in every case only the mote connected with the red USB cable works, I’ve tried swapping channels, swapping shims, swapping Motes, but no combination results in both Motes working at the same time. Is there something special about the red USB cable? I’ve tried swapping the standard USB cable for a white one similar to the red one but no change… I doubt I’ve damaged the board as each channel will work individually…

Any ideas?

Puzzled of Manchester…

2

I would guess that the voltage drop is higher than desirable to ensure the APA102 are fed power adequately. The cable we sell are specifically a higher than average gage for this very reason.

3

Marvelous :-) I found a particular phat usb cable and this worked, alongside the red cable - so I got both Motes working.

I’ll order the official cables next time :-)

One more question: I can’t get the Cheerlights example script to work in Python3 - it works fine in Python2.
Is there any reason for this?
I tried installing Requests for Python3 by typing sudo pip3 install requests but it said it was already installed…

4

I believe that has been reported on Github, the code for that particular example currently only works in Python 2.

5

Yup, that was me. I posted an easy fix @mamvcivm if you want to try it out: