Frustration!

Firefly’s lid includes a few decorative features such as lights and a servo to move Doofus’s head. This requires a microcontroller to drive it, so I thought I’d build a circuit over the weekend.

I started off by building some of the circuitry on a breadboard; the rear lights use LED strips and I wanted to write a library to work in conjunction with FastLED (the Arduino library that drives LED strips) to do some visual effects. I used a Teensy 4.0 as the controller for the circuit, mainly because that’s the first controller I came to in my box of bits.

All went well, and I ended up with this…

Satisfied that it was working, and happy that it hadn’t been difficult, I went on to build a stripboard circuit…

Frustratingly, this doesn’t work: the LED strips either don’t work at all, or occasionally they flash but in the wrong colour. After some hours of trying to find the fault, I am no wiser. The only difference I can find between the stripboard version and the breadboard one is the controller; Teensy 4.0 on the breadboard, DFRobot Beetle on the stripboard. I assume that the LED strip library doesn’t work properly on the Beetle, although I can’t find any sign of this on the internet.

I think I will give in and rework the circuit with a Teensy. But this is not as straightforward as I would like; there’s not much room in the robot for the electronics.