Hub75 and Pixelvation Engine with WLED

Hello everyone!

I have ordered Pixelvation Engine boards and a HUB75. I have successfully flashed the custom boards with PixelvationEngine_HUB75 firmware. I have confirmed that the pinouts are correct and that the engine gets the power it needs. It shows the color wheel correctly at initial startup which confirms that I selected the correct kPanelType and size. I got another esp32 and flashed it with the latest release for WLED which was 0.14.2. I can confirm that the WLED esp32 responds to the WLED web interface and controls a test apa102 strip without any issues. However as soon as I connect the WLED controller to the Pixelvation Engine, the HUB75 goes blank which means the translator is getting some communication but does nothing else. If I disconnect the WLED controller and restart the Pixelvation Engine, the color wheel comes back on.

I have tried different configurations for the WLED firmware including the Sound Reactive build from WLED. I am not sure what to try next. If there are any tips, suggestions or troubleshooting that can get the HUB75 working with WLED, I would greatly appreciate it!

Thanks again!

I think the engine should be spitting out some debugging info via serial, can you see that?

Perhaps you’re sending pixels too fast, or not enough pixels?

I have not checked to see if the engine outputs any debugging info due to some of the pins being used to power the engine. I can try to rig something so I can connect the esp 01 programmer and get some serial output for debugging purposes.

I have tried lower CLK speeds but WLED seems to set it back to its own CLK speed. The HUB75 has 2048 leds so I set WLED to 2048 leds. I find it interesting because if I try to do any value lower or higher than 2048 in WLED such as 2047, the color wheel does not go away. As soon as I change the value to 2048 leds, the color wheel goes away but remains blank.

Sounds like it’s receiving a valid frame, so either the data coming from WLED isn’t containing useful pixels, or PVE isn’t displaying the frame properly.

Can you try with a smaller frame size, like 32x32 in case it’s exceeding some kind of pixel count limitation?

Thank you for the suggestion. I went ahead and flashed another board with some changes so I can have 32x32 instead of 64x32.I am still getting the same issues as I did with the other setup with 64x32. I changed some settings with WLED and did 1024 instead of 2048 which does make the HUB75 go blank. If I try under 1024 then there is no response. Due to this I believe that it is not a pixel count limitation. I am not sure if there is a library issue somewhere that is causing issues.

What is interesting is that with your firmware, it will not compile correctly unless I add a few lines to SmartMatrix/src/esp32_i2s_parallel.c as indicated here. I do not know if that may be causing issues.

If you have any other suggestions or troubleshooting, I would greatly appreciate it!