Unicorn pHAT and zero w (mood light kit)

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I can also confirm this behaviour. Fresh raspbian-lite (downloaded yesterday) on a mood light kit with an additional sandisk SD card & offical RPi power supply.

uname -a:

Linux raspberrypi 4.4.50+ #970 Mon Feb 20 19:12:50 GMT 2017 armv6l GNU/Linux

cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep Revision:

Revision        : 9000c1

I installed Unicornhat by following the getting started guide (learn.pimoroni.com/tutorial/unicorn-hat/getting-started-with-unicorn-hat):

curl -sS get.pimoroni.com/unicornhat | bash

And when it didn’t work, I found this answer from @gadgetoid, so I’ve tried running:

sudo pip uninstall rpi_ws281x
sudo pip3 uninstall rpi_ws281x
sudo pip install rpi_ws281x
sudo pip3 install rpi_ws281x

and confirmed that the rpi_ws281x versions are 2.0.4 which seems to have the ZeroW defined (github.com/pimoroni/unicorn-hat/blob/master/library/rpi-ws281x/lib/rpihw.c).

I’ve run sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade successfully with no errors, to no avail.

I’ve made sure I have the most up to date unicornpy (2.1.2) with both

sudo pip install -I unicornhat
sudo pip3 install -I unicornhat

but running any combination of:

cd ~/Pimoroni/unicornhat/examples
sudo ./rainbow.py
sudo python rainbow.py
sudo python3 rainbow.py

gives the same result:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "rainbow.py", line 6, in <module>
    import unicornhat as unicorn
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/unicornhat.py", line 14, in <module>
    ws2812.begin()
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/neopixel.py", line 114, in begin
    raise RuntimeError('ws2811_init failed with code {0}'.format(resp))
RuntimeError: ws2811_init failed with code -1
Exiting cleanly

(except python3 which lists python3.4 instead of python2.7)

What’s the next step to chasing the source of this error?