I'm working on a sort of lightsaber and due to some design choices I needed two different types of neopixel strings and am having some difficulty getting them to work together, but I'll explain some things first.

I'm running everything off of this:

http://www.plecterlabs.com/shop/prod...products_id=74

An older prizm v5.1 sound board. It handles all of the addresses for me and applies a specified color and light-up sequence based on some variables.

Last week I was running some tests with these:

https://www.adafruit.com/product/2969

and everything was working fine, everything lit up as it should have and functioned properly.



A few days later I had to make a design change that meant I needed two different types of neopixel, part of this design needed the light to run through a thinner conduit so I thought I could just solder the two strips together. This is the other strip I'm using:

https://www.sparkfun.com/products/14730

I made sure to find a strip with the same voltage and that used the same addresses as adafruit neopixles. I tested each strip separately with the soundboard to make sure they both functioned properly, they did, each of them lit up and turned off as they should have just fine. At this point I cut a couple inches off of the thinner strip, since I only needed the thin part to be a short segment, and soldered it to the wider piece. I changed the values on the soundboard so that it knew I was going to have a few more LEDs now. When I powered it on though it didn't work as expected. The short segment would light up just fine but for some reason only two or three of the LEDs on the wider section would turn on. I made sure to check my connections, I checked and re-checked all of my settings on the sound board, I even desoldered the sections and tested them independently (they worked fine) just to make sure I didn't short them by mistake but I still couldn't get more than a few LEDs on the wider strip to respond.



I'm not sure if I'm doing something I shouldn't be doing or if theres some rule about neopixels I'm unaware of or if maybe adafruit stuff just doesn't play nice with others, or maybe I need some small piece of hardware between the two strips to "convert" things.

I've been trying to figure this out and am a little stumped. I'd appreciate any input or insight into this