Neo-monitor LED behaviors, colors, and brightness

Notecard API
1

We are testing out Neo-monitor mode (with an offset of 1 so that we can manually control the first LED), but what we’re seeing isn’t 100% matching up with the documentation, which says:

As a NeoPixel can be programmed to display any color of the rainbow, this general purpose LED flashes the following colors:

  • yellow (“STATUS”) to acknowledge when the AUX1 button is pressed.
  • white (“SERIAL”) when there is an active serial transaction.
  • a series of green (“COMM BUSY”) LED blinks as the newly created _button.qo Notefile is successfully sent to Notehub.
  • blue (“GPS”) when the GPS module is active.
  • If there is a failure to connect to a network, the LED flashes red (“COMM ERROR”) continuously for two minutes, followed by a four second flash once per minute thereafter.

What we’re seeing instead (photos attached):

LED 2 - very brief WHITE pulses with serial/usb connection
LED 3 - very long YELLOW continuous pulses with any cell/wifi modem activity
LED 4 - long GREEN pulses, briefly when note synced to Notehub
LED 5 - very brief PALE YELLOW pulses with GPS activity

Firstly I wanted to verify this is expected/reproducible behavior, or if something is incorrect on our end.

If this in fact working as intended, is it possible to put in a dev request to have the GPS led color changed to blue as it’s described in the docs. Having two yellow LEDs is less than ideal from a ‘troubleshooting at a glance’ standpoint.

Another observation is that there is a massive variance in perceived brightness of the different LEDs. Primarily because the yellow modem activity light stays lit so long that it becomes obnoxiously bright, so we had to dial down the brightness of the strip to 10% not to be blinded. But doing so makes the white serial LED and the yellow GPS LED far less visible because they only stay lit for a small fraction of a second and therefore appear substantially more dim than the yellow monster beside them. Perhaps the yellow modem activity LED could be made to flash much more briefly like the other LEDs? Honestly at anything over 30% brightness it’s painful to look at up close. (video link: https://youtu.be/rcjkgza4uho ) Alternatively the other LEDs could be made to flash longer so they’re more visible at 5-10% brightness. Either way, more uniformity/consistency between them would be a big improvement.

More info: We are running a cell+wifi notecard with dev release 7.5.2. Our strip of 5 Neopixels is powered from the same 5V 3A power supply as the Notecard. We have tested this using various brightness (sensitivity) settings from 5 to 100 with similar results.

Thanks in advance.

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Hi @josh77,

Thanks for this thorough write-up! I went ahead and tested this scenario with neo-monitor mode and it appears our docs are slightly off.

If this in fact working as intended, is it possible to put in a dev request to have the GPS led color changed to blue as it’s described in the docs. Having two yellow LEDs is less than ideal from a ‘troubleshooting at a glance’ standpoint.

What’s missing from our docs is the fact that when GPS is looking for satellites, the NeoPixel will flash orange. When it has established a GPS signal it turns to blue.

I’ve had luck with sensitivity:10 as a good balance between the LEDs flashing vs sustained. A lot will depend on the surrounding brightness of the environment though!

Rob

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Thanks Rob for confirming that what we’re seeing is correct. Admittedly we were testing indoors last night and so we never got a GPS lock, so I guess that’s why we never saw that LED turn Blue.

That’s also likely why that beastly yellow activity LED feels so bright, as our lab is dimly lit. It shouldn’t seem nearly as aggressive once the product is outdoors in brighter light.

Thanks!

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