Hello, this may be a long shot but I'm at a loss with my issue. Maybe @Wotever could possibly have some insight but I know he's very busy. Anyone who could help would be much appreciated. I am a maker with a successful sim-related Etsy shop (DaksPrintShop) and I make 2 different 8x8 LED products that use Sunfounder DM163 8x8 LED matrix. I've sold around 60-70 units in total and never had an issue setting them up in sim hub until now.
Photos here:
For my most recent order, I received a batch of 20 sunfounder 8x8 units and I have been using the Elegoo Arduino UNO R3 Board. At first everything appeared to work properly after uploading the sketch via sim hub the way have always done it but after my QC test I've found that several colors are not accurately displaying. Most importantly, white is not white at all. It appears pink or purple. I've test all 20 LEDs from this batch and tried 4 different R3 Uno boards and the issue is consistent.
I've had several exchanges with the China-based Sunfounder support reps and they sent me a basic sketch to upload in IDE that shows letters, numbers, and colors. I was surprised to see that all of them appear accurate including white. After further inspecting the units, it appears that Sunfounder has changed the BCP they are using for the driver/shield LED/Arduino interface device. They look quite a bit different.
Is there any chance that I could change something in sim hub to solve this or would an update be needed? My last option is a full redesign that uses a pro micro WS2812B setup but this is problematic for my current open orders.
Hi it's looks like they made big changes, the sketch is made for the original "colorduino" compatible shields (dm163 based) design and sunfunder was 100% compatible until now. I tried to check the sunfunder wiki and documentation for the matrix is still the same and unchanged since 2017. Maybe they sold you a different model which is not dm163 anymore ? Unfortunately based on the picture I can't find any clues to identify a specific chip/model/name to buy and test the same "variant". I will watch if this variant happens more often and try to buy it if I can find it in France.
Currently I never had any mentions of this new model, and sunfunder documentations does not mention it which makes it a "mistery" to my eye.
Thank you so much for the reply! I've been buying these very often due to the popularity of my Flag Deck design (LED Flag Box + Stream Deck Housing all in one unit). This just started..the most recent 2 batches from the Sunfounder shop and their amazon store have been this new variant. I ended up having to strip the older working units off of my own setup to fill orders that were due because I didn't like the idea of sending a unit to a customer that couldn't do white light. I did find through some testing that if I change the color to "pale green" in sim hub it's very close to white. Not viable though as most customers will not be going in to edit their sim hub animations....I'm working on a redesign for the pro micro now so this may ultimately be the solution but I'm racing the clock to fill open orders to avoid having to cancel and refund.