AntonioRuocco:
I've discovered that what I'm personally experiencing is a start-up issue which happens only after a power cycle when 2 or more zones are defined in the SW. I tested it up to 4 zones and in this case I observe also that some of the displays in the last positions of the chain turn off after few seconds.
If I perform an Arduino soft reset, everything goes back to normal and works fine. The same if I reload the sw a second time keeping the Arduino board on.It seems an initialization timing issue, which might be probably more evident in case of long device chains (I presume...)
Hi Antonio and Marco, I have had the same issues. I am running IDE 1.6.9 and the latest downloadable library offered. The Zone example sketches run fine but if I compile a larger code (a 2 zone scrolling time display I modified, nothing too fancy) I have intermittent cold start problems. I have also encountered warm boot issues, but fewer. Simply rearranging some headers or adding an include or moving some code changes this behaviour so it seems memory (alloc/init) related. I have tried this on 2 NANOs and one UNO (which I use for other projects and am 100% certain work fine). Surprisingly if I leave the Arduino powered on (blank display) and wait for some time, then power off and on, it magically starts working again - very mysterious. As I said, the example sketches without zones always work 100% after every cold boot or warm boot, I have noticed that my array flashes every so slightly at code start but then remains blank when the problem occurs. When it blanks, I have to reflash the Arduino then unplug and warm reset it to get it working again - this happens on all the arduinos I have so it's not arduino hardware related. I first thought of some faulty 8x8 module (I am using 5 in a row, FC-16 type) but I haven't had cold boot problems with any other test code (scrolling sprites etc) I tried in these weeks. I downloaded the latest library from Marco's links now and will try again and see what happens and report back.
A question regarding the Zones: is it possible to toggle a single LED in this mode or is it only possible to pass the whole string pointer to be displayed then refresh? I would like to update a single dot based on an external random event/signal in the zone without the need to refresh all of the specific zone's contents. I guess I could do this through the MDMAX lib directly but would like to avoid some bashing.
Cheers for the support!