First time playing with Raspberry Pi things and purchased the Wireless Plasma Kit. Having a bit of a nightmare, to be honest!
Got it connected to my Mac and have Thonny installed. Lights did nothing, however, so double and triple checked the connectors - all looked good. Noticed in Thonny that nothing was showing up on the Pico (empty directory), so after some rooting around decided (rightly or wrongly!) that as I wasn’t sure what state the board was in as it had none of the files the assembly guide said should be there, that I’d nuke it with flash_nuke.uf2 and then install pimoroni-picow-v1.19.12-micropython.uf2
All seemed to go well, created a WIFI_CONFIG.py and then tried one of the example files from the plasma stick examples (Alternating Blinkies). However, when I try to run it execution seems to hang at the following line:
Narrowed it down to that line by forcing execution to stop after each line until I got to the one that caused it. If I try to Stop it in Thonny, the device just disappears and I have to unplug it and plug it back in to get it to show again. Clueless what the problem might be.
I did try another example but that required wifi network and the package NetworkManager doesn’t exist, and I haven’t got a clue where to start with installing that.
Hey there - sorry to hear that your Plasma Stick missed the preloading step. Did the bag it came in have a little round sticker with a batch number on - if you let me know the colour and the number I’ll let production know.
network_manager.py and WIFI_CONFIG.py can be found in the common directory here: pimoroni-pico/micropython/examples/common at main · pimoroni/pimoroni-pico · GitHub . If you click the green code button on the front page of the repo there’s a ‘download zip’ option that will let you download the whole repo, you can then transfer all the examples at once using Thonny’s ‘files’ window rather than having to copy them one by one.
I don’t have a Mac so will probably of limited use troubleshooting your connection issues but it sounds like the USB device is crashing if it needs a restart. If it’s an older Mac it might be worth checking that the USB port you’re using is capable of supplying enough current for the whole string of LEDs - you could try changing ‘NUM_LEDS’ to 1 or 10 to see if it works with fewer LEDs (and less current)?
Really appreciate the help, hel. Put 1.19.11 on and all working as expected! Thanks also for the link to the network_manager.py file as well, fantastic.
I had the same issue trying to upgrade a Plasma Stick 2040 with pimoroni-picow-v1.19.12-micropython.uf2. Using pimoroni-picow-v1.19.11-micropython.uf2 worked as others have said. I couldn’t even get as far as the COM port connecting with 1.19.12.
Strangely 1.19.11 reports it’s version as :-
import os
os.uname()
(sysname=‘rp2’, nodename=‘rp2’, release=‘1.19.1’, version=‘9dfabcd on 2022-12-21 (GNU 9.2.1 MinSizeRel)’, machine=‘Raspberry Pi Pico W with RP2040’)
Happy to report we’ve tracked down and fixed this bug so the next release should work with Plasma again :)
I think the release number reported by os is the MicroPython release that our customised version is built upon - the last official release was v1.19.1 back in June. We’ve incorporated a bunch of prerelease patches and upgrades since then though!
I’m not sure if its related but 1.19.12 also locked up my Galactic Unicorn. If totally locked up / froze and I had to flash_nuke it and go back to 1.19.11. Pressing reset just got me another lock up on boot up. Couldn’t connect with Thonny either so no way to delete the main.py file
@alphanumeric Just tried v1.19.12 on my Galactic Unicorn with the launcher examples and it seems to be working OK for me - but drop us a Github issue with the details if you’re having trouble!
The eighties_super_computer.py was what locked up for me.
I’ll flash nuke it and have another try. If I get the same lockup I’ll post it as an issue on github.
Hi,
I’ve had a Starry Edition displaying ‘rainbows.py’ happily since December last year, but recently it has started to ‘lock up’ after running for a few hours. At first I thought it might be an issue with the power supply, but I have swapped that and it’s still happening. Is this a known problem?
Thonny reports that I am running MicroPython 38e7b84 on 2023-03-27; Raspberry Pi Pico W with RP2040
OK, so I’ve made some progress in resolving this problem, which may be of interest to others:
Firstly I noticed that although the majority of the LEDs were ‘stuck’, the first in the chain was still working. This made me wonder if the problem was timing of the data being sent to the LEDs; the parameters given in the WS2812 example from Raspberry Pi have been questioned in various threads elsewhere. I built a number of different test programs in both Micropython and C, but wasn’t convinced that data timing was the problem. There are timing differences between a WS2812 and a WS2812B and it’s not clear which I have.
One thing that I did find during my testing is that my LEDs are GRB, rather than the RGB used in the example.
The ‘one working LED’ was puzzling me, especially as one of my test programs exercised the entire string reliably. I had seen that some people had reverted to an early release of Micropython (1.19.11) when experiencing problems, so I did the same, but I also changed the ‘v’ value in the led_strip.set_hsv() call from 1.0 to 0.5 - this was to make them less bright, which I wanted.
And the good news is that the Rainbow Star has now been working perfectly for hours.
I know that changing 2 things at the same time doesn’t help in identifying the cause of the problem - I may try updating Micropython to a newer version at some stage to see if that’s the cause. But my instinct tells me that reducing the brightness, and probably the heat dissipated in each LED, is more likely to be what resolved my problem. Oh, and it’s working with the original power supply!