I set up my phatbeat fine. When playing audio the VU meter works perfectly.
When I try to run the examples (hue_control and rainbow) The lights on the phat beat have a seizure. They look like they’re trying to do what the program says but they flicker quickly and don’t turn on in the right order. Every five minutes or so the lights will start working correctly but that only lasts a few seconds and then its back to the sporadic behavior.
Using something simpler like:
import phatbeat
for channel in (0,1):
phatbeat.set_pixel(0, 255, 0, 0, channel=channel)
phatbeat.show()
results in a random light flickering on and off with no other indication that the program worked.
I’ve checked my soldering on both the pi and the phat beat. Seems fine, and I assume it must be because the VU meter is working.
I’m running the latest release of rasbian stretch lite. I installed with curl -sS get.pimoroni.com/phatbeat | bash.
Tried executing with python 2.7 and python 3.5.3, same behavior with both.
Any ideas why my LED’s are acting like this? All help is appreciated.
Yes, this is quite the gotcha! I’m hoping when I finally find the time to make the switch from the big blob of C I’m using for Pi VU Meter to the Python-backed version, problems like this will go away!
@gadgetoid I ran into the same problem. Renaming /etc/asound.conf helped to get the demos working, but I’m kind of lost now.
My plan was to build an RFID audio player incl. a VU meter and / or FFT spectrum analyser (mode switch) + status indication (e.g. low battery). While I don’t quite understand the impact of a “Python-backed” solution to “problems like this”, I would highly appreciate some sort of framework that gets “me” closer to that goal.
If there is anything that I, as a python / electronics beginner, can do to speed things up, give me a call (Pizza, a beverage?!).
P.S. Issue #72 seems to apply to the VU meter leds as well (e.g. rainbow.py example).