Hello! I am having some issues with my Arduino Nano. I have an UNO that I had up and running- but my nano isn't cooperating with me. I have uploaded the FastLED example sketch Fire2012 to my Nano. After a few seconds, it freezes both the Nano and the LED strip(s). If I have two LED strips connected, it freezes more quickly than if I have just one.
I followed some advice to verify that the arduino is actually freezing -not just the code running the LED strips- and I added a bit of code to Fire2012 to make the onboard LED on the nano blink on and off. Sure enough that LED also stops functioning when the LEDs freeze. So it is not just an issue with my LED strips.
Here's my setup:
My LED strips (WS2812B) have three wires each - a positive, a negative, and a data wire. I have soldered these three wires of two strips together - so I basically have 1 master positive wire, 1 master negative wire, 1 master date wire, that I've then connected to my Arduino.
On my Nano, I added a latching switch to the GND pin, and have that connected to the master negative wire of my LED strips. I have my master data wire going to Pin 5 on my nano, and I have a 470 ohm resistor on that line. Lastly, I have my master positive wire going to the 5V pin on my nano.
I should mention that this freezing issue appears when I run other sketches too, not only Fire2012. It seems most complex LED strip sketches freeze pretty quickly. Only some very simple ones (like the FastLED Heartbeat sketch) can run for awhile without freezing.
Does anyone have any ideas on what could be wrong? I've checked my solder points, nothing appears to be making accidental contact... Could I be using the wrong Resistor value? Any advice would be greatly appreciated! I'm d@#$ near stumped!!
Thank you for reading!