LED lights are not showing colors correctly and make strange flashes

[ChoPraTs]

Hello.

With the help of a student, we have tried to assemble and install this Piano-LED-Visualizer on my piano. I purchased all the components as mentioned in the tutorial, and with his help, we completed the hardware and software installation.

At first, I had a small issue with the LCD screen, which initially only displayed a blank screen. However, I believe this might be related to version 1.6 of the software (recently released). When I installed the previous version, 1.5.1, the issue was resolved, and the screen now works normally.

However, there is another issue that I haven’t been able to solve, which involves the LED lights. Based on videos from other users, my lights do not seem to be functioning correctly or as expected. They do not display the correct colors that I select and also produce strange flickering effects.

It seems that the correct LEDs light up according to the keys I press on the MIDI keyboard. However, the light does not remain steady—there is an odd flickering in the adjacent LEDs, showing strange colors, which I believe should not be happening.

I have tried resetting the Raspberry Pi multiple times and also tested with another LED strip, but the issue persists. Both strips are WS2812B models with 144 LEDs per meter, but one is white with IP30 protection, and the other is black with IP62 protection. Here is the link: AliExpress

Could you help us or give us any idea of where the problem might be? Maybe we have misunderstanding some connection or are the lights of poor quality?

Thank you very much!

[jbne]

This maybe sounds like a bad connection of the light strip's neutral wire to the raspberry pi's GPIO pin? The way I was connecting at first was by wrapping the wire around the GPIO pin and using some electrical tape to wrap it, which worked for some time but started exhibiting these sort of symptoms until I soldered the neutral and data lines to the GPIO pins, seems more reliable now.