Missing red and blue on top half of panel?

[davepl]

This is with older SmartMatrix3 code, but everything is working properly except I am missing red and blue in top half of my 64x32 panel. Green pixels draw just fine across then whole thing.

I verified PINOUT, seems to be correct. Any ideas? I’m hoping it’s something obvious I can try!

Thanks
Dave

[Louis]

Nice to hear you’re working on matrix stuff again. Might be a hardware issue. If you can swap your red and green pins between the micro and matrix, see if that narrows down the problem. If you’re on the ESP32, you can swap the pin numbers in the MatrixHardware file to also try to narrow down the issue without moving cables

[davepl]

Found it! I’m using a different version of the hardware than the schematic I have on hand for! The pinout changed, so once I fixed that, as you can imagine, it got better.

I’m trying to remember what features I had added that might be worth porting over to the main branch for you - that you haven’t already done in the interim! I had scrolling text and alphablended layers so you could fade them in and out… anything useful there?

Thanks!
Dave

[Louis]

I think vertical scrolling text and alphablended layers are both useful. A lot in the library has changed with 4.0, so it won’t be so easy to merge your changes in. I’m not planning to improve the legacy Background/Scrolling/Indexed layers - the only layers that were in SmartMatrix Library 3.0 - new features will be going into the “GFX” layers, based on Adafruit_GFX.

Details:

Adafruit_GFX Compatible Layers - Modern Font Support coming to SmartMatrix Library 4.0

Adding support for larger fonts has been a popular feature request for years, and I never took on the project as I thought it might be a difficult project. Turns out I was right, but now at least most of the work is done, and you can now run sketches like this using the “teensy4” branch, and this will be coming in the upcoming SmartMatrix Library 4.0 release. There is now a new SMLayerBackgroundGFX layer (equivalent to SMLayerBackground) and new SMLayerGFXMono layer (equivalent to…

Features

If porting those features over to the GFX layers is too much work, if you even just want to share your modified SmartMatrix 3.x files, I can do a diff and port those features over to the GFX when I get back to working on SmartMatrix Library again.

I’ve been focusing lately on making improvements to the WLED project as it has a lot of great support for controlling LEDs with patterns through a UI and support for many different APIs, but needs help adding support for 2D and driving a lot of pixels with high quality graphics efficiently. Some more details here:

Standalone Matrix controller (APA102 to HUB75 Panel Adapter)

Again, not sure what files you’re referring to, but this is the latest evolution of the project, in case you’re ordering some older design (which still might be useful too, not sure): Here’s WLED driving Pixelvation Engine with 4096 pixels: There’s still a lot more room for improvement on making WLED more efficient for driving large high quality displays, but it’s going pretty well so far! I’m discussing my work here:

It’s a project worth checking out now with the caveat that the current built in patterns are underwhelming. The upcoming 0.12 release will make it much more appealing with a lot of user friendly changes like being able to choose what type of LEDs and what pins to drive from the UI (instead of #defines). Better patterns and 2D support in the main branch will come in the future.

[davepl]

If you’re willing to do the diff, I’m more than happy to zip up the entire project folder and send it to you. I looked quickly and I think the scrolling text is likely useful, and I appear to have added ChromaKey and Transparency to the layers.

That gives you these:
titleLayer.setChromaKeyColor(chromaKeyColor);
titleLayer.enableChromaKey(true);

I also noticed that I added the ability to blend between layers by setting transparency, unless that was already there too!

        titleLayer.setBrightness(captionTransparency * 240);                // 255 would obscure it entirely

I’ll see if I can add you to the github repo for it, if not, I’ll work on emailing it!