LED timing options for WLED are being discussed - solution ideas for flickering issues with WS281x leds

[maxroseGIT]

There are quite some reports on flickering led strips with WLED.

I saw flickering in my setups when switching from WLED 0.16 to moonlight 0.7. So I think it might be of interest to follow solutions in WLED.

Check out the summary review and solution ideas from WLED:

WLED issue #5264

[ewowi]

Related context:

Is there an option forseen, to tweak the high-low logic timings for WS281x led strips?
I feel that there are many leds out there, that might work only when these timings are optimized for the current setup at hand (data cable length & levelshifter combination). In the current version 0.7 I didn't get my WS2813 pixel to work flawlessly. With some testing and help from a WLED dev I nailed it down to the timings of the WS281x settings in WLED. Fastled seems to use another set of timings and with pure fastled sketches uploaded via Arduino IDE I get them working fine on an ESP32 POE board from Olimex.

Quick check: What esp32 are you using? Did you try the Parallel LED driver in MoonLight? That runs flicker free for ws2812 , as ws2813 is pretty similar first check if that works. FastLED (using RMT) is not flicker free yet.

Looking at WS2813:

1. Signal protocol (ESP32 timing)

Good news first:
👉 The data protocol is essentially the same for WS2812 and WS2813.

• Single-wire NRZ protocol

• ~800 kHz data rate

• Same bit encoding (T0H / T1H pulse widths)

Implication for ESP32

• Any ESP32 driver that works for WS2812 (RMT, LEDC, bit-bang, FastLED, NeoPixelBus, ESP-IDF RMT) will also work for WS2813

• No code changes required in most libraries

✔️ You can usually just change the LED type constant.

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2. Reset / latch time (important difference)

LED | Reset time (low) -- | -- WS2812 / WS2812B | ~50 µs WS2813 | ≥ 300 µs