I might have brought this up last year,

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I might have brought this up last year, or I might have posted it elsewhere and just never found a solve: Has anyone else experienced, or better yet, got a solution for signal interference caused by LEDs?

At least, I’m pretty sure it’s my LEDs as opposed to the arduino itself, but I really don’t know. The issue is: I can’t open my garage door with my remote unless I’m a few inches away from the antenna while my LEDs are on. I have two shortish lengths of ws2812b strips for my Christmas tree and my snowy village scene. The layout of my townhouse has my living room directly over my garage and the light display is in the living room.

I’m assuming there’s some sort of ingress/egress that is blocking or otherwise scrambling the signal to my garage door, but I can’t figure out how to negate it, short of finding a way to build a Faraday cage around either the Arduino or the garage door opening.

Any bright ideas? (See… bright, LEDs, get it?)

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I do remember you mentioning this before. And I have the same cartoon question mark showing up over my head again! I have no idea how it might be interacting, however you mentioning a Faraday cage made me wonder… if you put something like this down on the floor between your LEDs and garage door antenna, would it have any affect?

Emf Protection Fabric - Big Size - 36.2 X 42.4 inches

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Is it infrared remote or rf?

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Here’s the old post…
https://plus.google.com/118127046082317810519/posts/ABP6x8votXZ

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I was running some Christmas LEDs around my house last year and the radio in our bathroom whined like crazy every morning. This year, no problem. Turns out it was the power supply. If I plug in the previous power supply (I use it for bench work) the radio whines. Until the switch, I was convinced it was the LEDs causing the problem.

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My uncle replaced some older florescent bulb lights with some new “LED tube” lights. He told me he’s really happy with the new lighting but is getting interference on his radio so he’s investigating Ferrites. He just sent me these two informative videos today. Maybe something to try on your LED power supply.


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@marmil Might be worth a shot, or even just an anti-static bag around the arduino might do the trick.

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@Ben_Delarre I’m assuming you mean the garage door opener. It’s RF.

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@Jeremy_Spencer Sho nuff, that was it. I even said I had a whole year to work on it and, obviously, that never happened.

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@allanGEE That would fall in-line with the “radio frequency interference theory”. I might have to dig up my old boom box to see if I get something similar. Then it becomes, “how do I shield off the Arduino?” since it’s technically the power source if you don’t count the USB wall wart it plugs into.

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@marmil Someone suggested that last year too, and I DID pull a ferrite clamp off of another device, but I put it onto one of the connection wires instead of the USB cable. Thanks for the vids, I’ll see if I can rustle up some new clamps and try them on different wires.