LedWiz question

[fargo]

Do I have a bad LedWiz, or do I just not know how to use the thing?

I’ve got a LedWiz (bought new several months ago) that I’m trying to figure out without success, so I’m wondering if anyone that has one can give any suggestions?  I’m to the point of thinking maybe the LedWiz doesn’t work.

I’ve got 8 buttons – Ultralux with the Ultralux 5v leds – hooked up to the LedWiz ports 1-8, and have PC power supply 5v running to the 1-8 bank and ground to the ground port.  If I run a piece of wire to any of the 1-8 ports and the other to the 1-8 bank, each of the lights does light up.

So my question is… when the PC is on, should the lights come on without anything else done, or if not, how do you tell it to turn on?  I’ve attempted the LedBlinky plugin (MALA) and LedWiz plugin also with no success (and by success, I mean getting any button to light up).  I then just tried the software from the GGG site as follows: launch the ledwiz87.exe and make sure that the monitor clipboard is checked, then using the lwsend.exe interactive window, tried sending ‘ON’ commands… with no results.  (Command example tried: LWZ-SB1:255)

So I’m either missing something with how to use the thing, or the board doesn’t work.

(oh, also, the board does show up in the Control Panel -> Device Manager)

Any suggestions??

[RandyT]

If I run a piece of wire to any of the 1-8 ports and the other to the 1-8 bank, each of the lights does light up.

This is throwing up a big red flag.  If you can get them to light by running a wire from 5v to the ports, then you have the LED's hooked up backward.  It must be configured in a common anode fashion and it sounds like you have it set up as common cathode.

RandyT

[fargo]

Thank you Randy.  Looks like I get to do some re-wiring this evening.  A quick voltage tester does indeed show me a 5v circuit on those ports - for some reason I had assumed the ports were positive and fed through the board by the associated voltage bank.  I think the older I get the more I don't think I need to read through instruction sheets completely.