Reef Angel Forum

Hey guys! I've been lurking here for a while, managing to find my own answers, but I've got a question now that I'm stumped on-

Something strange happens to my lights when I use the control stick. For some reason, when the lights(leds) are running at a pwm near the cutoff point, which for me is at 11pwm, when I hit the control stick to turn on the lcd screen the lights get a small power boost!

I'm not exactly sure what is going on here- the pwm reading on screen says what it should, but the lights will suddenly get brighter. I'm not 100% sure if they dim back down or not, but if they do, it is gradually because I have never noticed a sudden dimming. It has happened probably about 3 or 4 times in the last few weeks that I have noticed, and if I had to guess I would say it increases the lighting by about 10pwm.

Also- this may or may not have anything to do with this but, but when I first got my RA+, the first temp port never seemed to work 100%. If it gets wiggled or touched, it looses connection or says the temp is like 180 degrees and goes into overheat mode.

Any ideas?

I've never seen this before.
Can you measure the voltage on the dimming ports?
Does it happen only with low dimming signals?

Sent from my SPH-D700 using Tapatalk 2

Yes I have a multimeter to measure with but it might be a while before I can get in there and start disconnecting things.

I have only seen it happen when the signal is at 11/12. It seems to be sporatic, and has only happened a handful of times; I tried to recreate the issue by setting the dimming manually, but no luck.
It has also happened on both channels at least once that I know of, and I have had it happen both near the beginning and end of the light cycle.
A couple of specific examples that I can recall:
blue channel just turned on, hit stick, blues got brighter. - I've also had this happen with the white channel
white channel turned off a minute or two before it was supposed to, hit stick, whites turned back on.


And now that I think about it, the light issue didn't start happening until I updated the libraries and switched from pwmslope to pwmparabola- might just be coincidence but thought it would be worth mentioning. I'm beginning to think that since they shut off at 10, they might be acting strange because they are kind of on the edge of going out. Maybe I'll see if a slightly stronger pwm signal will help...

well I think my hunch was right. Over the last few days I kept my blues on 12pwm and whites on 11. I was able to recreate the issue with the whites a couple times but not the blues. SO I'm going to run them both on 12 to hopefully fix the issue.

Not sure why I didn't notice this before I updated the libraries, or why the control stick/lcd screen would cause them to turn on, but if this is all I need to fix it, then that will work for me. If not, I'll be back