PWM (Tlc5940) values are not linear and saturate midrange

PWM Val 0 250 500 750 1000 1100 1200 1300 1400 1500 1600 1700 1800 1900 2000 2020 2040 2041 2042 2043 2044 2045 2050 2100 4095
Voltage 12 11.86 11.33 10.58 9.27 8.84 8.26 7.67 7.09 6.51 5.92 5.35 4.79 4.21 3.7 3.6 2.84 2.47 1.56 0.45 0.05 0.002 0 0 0

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Thanks Nate for documenting. Will be curious to see why this is happening. Can you measure the voltage coming into the transistor (see schematic below, pin 1) to see if that that is from the TLC5940 chip or the transistor?

Measuring pin1 to pin2 of the transistor (gate to ground)

PWM Val 0 1000 1500 4095
Voltage 3.3 1.65 0.85 0

So this means that it’s the Tlc5940 itself right? Because the voltage I measured using the multimeter shouldn’t drop that quickly

Tagging @ezirayw. We’ve talked about this in the past. Ezira has o-scope traces coming off the Tlc at various input values.

I didn’t save the traces since I decided to ditch using intermediate PWM value. But if I remember correctly, the PWM duty cycle didn’t reflect what you’d expect given a certain Tlc input on the arduino, which lead to the voltages not being correct. I think it has to do with how the Tlc library is designed to communicate with the chip because the datasheet indicates that it should be proportional.

https://www.ti.com/lit/ds/symlink/tlc5940.pdf?ts=1643314201710 (page 20)

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It might be worth looking into the library and checking to see if arduino inputs are communicated properly

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Hello, there!

Did you figure out what was the issue? I’m having the same problem

Hey Eduarda! Sorry this has yet to be a critical issue for us, so no one has gone through the libraries to figure out the fix.

Hey @danhart if you’re talking to the EDF anyway, any chance you can get them to fix this?

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