ESP8266 Community Forum

I'm not sure what the question is really. I just wondered if anyone could shed light on this.
I connected an esp8266 directly to a 50 LED light strip (with level shifting etc). I used a logic analyzer to make sure the pulses were correct length. So it all worked fine with Arduino IDE 1.8.3 but when I installed IDE 1.8.12 the same code would not correctly set the LEDs ie it didn't work. I noticed the crystal frequency could be changed but that made not difference. Sorry in advance if this is a daft question.

- updating or reinstalling the version of IDE doesn't change anything for esp8266 boards package or settings. they are all preserved in the arduino15 folder.
- most esp8266 modules use a 26 MHz crystal.
- with wrong setting of the crystal the sketch would not work at all.
- so maybe the upload doesn't work if nothing changed with wrong crystal frequency

Thanks for your reply, I omitted to mention it was a new laptop with a clean install of the latest IDE. I also left the crystal frequency at the default 26MHz. What I observed was when I flash the ESP8266 on the new laptop (exact same code) it did not work. It did actually connect to the WiFi and serve up the webpage which controls the LEDs, however the LED strip just wasn't responding. I then took the chip and flashed it on the old laptop and it did work. All my electronic stuff is away so I just thought I'd ask here if anyone had any insight. I could possibly inspect the contents of Arduino15 folders. Ultimately I'll be getting the logic analyzer out again to solve this.

the version of the Arduino IDE is not really relevant.
A comparison of the old/new esp8266 core and led-pixel library would shed some light ...