I have a project involving lots of LEDs. These are the 2811 style serial RGB devices. I am using the LedStripXmas program with only the LED count being changed. I have been having success after success until after I put 4 strips together that have a total of 576 LEDs. Now I cannot get my 32u4 to take a program. If I hold while clicking Upload, I get “An error occurred while uploading the sketch”. No lights on the 3u4 flash when I try to program it. It continues to run with the current program, so it still works.
I grabbed another one, pushed 576, and it was working just fine. I then set the value for 720, got a message saying it may work unpredictably because I was reserving a lot of RAM, then it failed as before. So, now I have two devices that work just fine with 576 LEDs, but won’t let me reprogram them to anything else.
I moved your post to our A-Star and Orangutan sub-forum, which seemed more appropriate.
Looks like Jim_Remington’s suggestion helped resolved your issue. Just for those following this thread, you can find the revival methods under the “Reviving an unresponsive A-Star” section of the A-Star 32U4 User’s Guide.
If you are planning to add more LEDs in your setup, I recommend using a different microcontroller with a lot more RAM space (e.g. Arduino Mega). Alternatively, you could try splitting the data signal to control two (or more) separate LED chains (e.g. two 500 LED chains). The chains would mirror each other, but depending on how the LEDs are arranged it would probably be hard to notice for most of the patterns.
