Hi, I'm trying to build a setup using <a href=" removed link " target="_blank" rel="noopener">these 5mm LEDs with custom wiring. In my prototyping setup I have a single LED on a breadboard, connected to a Pi 3, and all powered by a 5V power supply. Also using an SN74AHCT125N level-shifter per the Basic parts list and everything is wired per <a href=" removed link " target="_blank" rel="noopener">this diagram. But I keep getting the problem where the LED flashes different colors. I know this often indicates a grounding issue but I've added as many as four ground leads between the Pi and the breadboard with no change in behavior. I've also tried different inputs and outputs on the level shifter. Sometimes that seems to make it more stable - but not 100% stable - and other times it doesn't seem to make a difference. I've also checked and wiggled all wires to see if any one of them might be a loose connection, changed breadboard holes, etc... None of that seems to make a difference.

I increased the logging fidelity and inspected those but I've never seen any errors reported. Which says to me that the software is working fine so from there, I wondered if I was shipped SK6812 LEDs instead of WS2812. If that were true then the LEDs might be GRBW instead of GRB. So as a test I modified line 307 of metar-v4.py to read 'LED_STRIP = ws.SK6812_STRIP_GRBW' per the rpi_ws281x library. Still no change so I'm really at a loss right now. The only think that I can think of at this point is that the level shifter might be bad. I'll probably order a couple more of those as a test but am I missing anything more obvious?

I'll also throw out that I set this project aside for a couple of years and am just now getting back to it. Using a previous version of the software and the same hardware, I never really had this flashing issue. It's only since I started back up and upgraded to v4 but that could just be a coincidence, who knows. Any ideas? I'd definitely appreciate any help. Thanks.