Hi Sandy,
Thanks for all the support here - the good news is that based on your investigation and suggestions all the four boards are now working! (There are a few small tiny issues with a dead pixel but I’ll email support directly about this). Thanks again for all your time fixing the issue for me!!
Cheers,
Neil
That’s great news, Neil. Glad I could help! We’re hurriedly “fixing” all of the Ubercorn boards this very minute… 😆
I think I may have a similar issue. I only have 2 Ubercorn boards. The one on the left (with Pi zero attached) has the jumpers at their default (0), the one on the right has just the first jumper set to on (1). In this configuration, neither board works.
My ribbon cable requires a kink (which makes me suspect its the wrong cable).
I have tried supplying additional power via a butchered USB cable, but that doesn’t appear to make a difference.
[EDIT] My first Ubercorn was bought when they first came out, the 2nd only recently.
[EDIT2] I found I could carefully remove the shroud off the first board and rotate it 180 degrees. This then allowed me to connect the ribbon cable as you’d expect (without a kink). I also re-arranged so that the Pi Zero was on the newer board (set to 1) and the older board set to (0) with the additional power (which I find I don’t actually need).
While this does appear to work (using the ubercorn-rainbow-2x1.py example) there is an odd quirk. On the older board (0) in this setup, the 4th column of pixels flashes regularly during updates. This is really obvious when you slow the example down to 1fps.
Any ideas what could be wrong?
I’m still trying to fathom out what’s going on with this. I’ve been sent a 3rd board as a replacement but all three appear to have the same issue.
I have also been sent a 2nd data cable (the longer variety) but that doesn’t appear to help.
One thing I’ve noticed (while playing with 3 boards before I return one) is that modifying the ubercorn-rainbow2x1.py to become 3x1 (width=48 rather than 32) results in the flickering 4th column on BOTH the additional boards.
To clarify, the board 0 with the Pi attached appears to be fine, but boards 1 and 2 suffer from the flickering 4th column each refresh).
It doesn’t appear to matter which order I place the boards in (as long as the DIP switches are correct) the additional boards always exhibit the problem (the “driver” board is fine).
Individually each board would appear to be fine, but I am unable to get 2 (or 3) working together properly.
As an aside, does anyone have code for a text-scroller across 2x1 boards? I can’t for the life of me fathom how to do it (I assumed it would be a case of changing the width (from 16 to 32) and leaving the height alone. The ubercorn-rainbow2x1.py looks like it does things a different way.
I’ve just re-visited this issue by using a PiZero2W in place of the original PiZero, hoping it may be a CPU-bound issue. Nope! Still get the same flickering column on the 2nd Ubercorn.
Fresh install of latest Raspberry Pi OS lite and all updated.