I am Uli from Germany. I purchased a DMX to LED shield and a ESP32 Thing plus. First I tried to start with the FastLED library and finaly managed to light some Lumini 8x8 matrixes. First Problem was to figure out that I have to press the 0 Button while programming the Board. This fact isn´t nowhere written. Is this normal? Now I am stuck with the next problem. when I power the board with the micro USB on the Thing Plus everything is ok. But when I plug in the DMX XLR Plug the Thing plus starts again and again. I can watch this in the serial monitor where I can read the “initialized” message. I have also the 5V external power supply on the board. I have loaded the DMX Input example onto the board. Have I done something wrong or ist the board/ shield damaged?
This is unbelievable. 17 days later no support. Sparkfun sells a microcontroller board that is compared to other boards extrordinary expensive. 5 times as expensive! I can’t easily program it as other boards because it has no auto reset while programming function. This fact isn’t written anywhere in the nice colorful hookup guide. Then they sell a DMX to LED board with again a nice colorful hookup guide. But it isn’t working with the sparkfun library. It has cost me days to find out that a other DMX library is working. And at least they wrote a nice manual what to do to get support within 3 wirking days when something is not working as expected. But nobody has answered my question! NO SUPPORT!!! This was the first and the last time I bought something from sparkfun and I give the advice to anybody not to do so.
I don’t really know what the issue here, the engineer who had designed the product is no longer with us and I don’t have any physical products to run tests on at this time. I feel like your system should not be resetting with the addition of the DMX shield.
We do move a good amount of the ESP32 Thing Plus DMX to LED Shields and we have not seen this issue you are presenting before as far as I can recall. The fact that you have 2 systems behaving the same way is indeed alarming. I suppose my only suggestions would be power related. Try different cables, USB ports, maybe a different computer and see if that helps.
If you want to send the units back we can figure something out. Just fill out a return ticket here: https://www.sparkfun.com/returns
The board constantly resetting sounds like a power issue; especially, if all you have done is attach the microcontroller board to the shield. Maybe, just try it with only the ESP32 Thing Plus, the DMX shield, and the USB connected.
If you aren’t using our ESP32 Thing Plus board, the issue is probably with the pinouts not matching up to the Thing Plus pin format. Otherwise, I’m not sure if the DMX shield works with the newer ESP32 models, like the S2.
Hi - my boss & I bought the ESP32 Thing Plus USB-C and the DMX-to-LED shield, and I am also seeing the constant rebooting when trying to run the DMX In example (#2). The good news is that Example 1, DMX Out, works fine just the way it’s provided; we have a really good DMX tool (a Swisson XMT-350) and it sees all the channel values changing the way they’re supposed to.
I have narrowed the problem down to the call to DMXSerial.begin in the timer ISR and wanted to reach out and see if anyone had gotten the “DMX In” example to work on a Thing Plus C.
