Hello there,
I currently use the Adafruit circuit playgrounds for a course I am teaching. We've been using them for several years and ordering new ones as needed and have never had any problems. We have 56 students in our class this year and I've found at least 8 circuit playgrounds that seem to have some problems with the neopixels to varying degrees. In some cases, multiple neopixels are dead. In other cases, one or more channels of one or more neopixels are dead (so e.g. only red). At first I thought this was an isolated incident, but like I said it has happened with at least 8 boards. I have tried reprogramming the playgrounds, including in bootloader mode, to no success. It's not clear whether the neopixels broke as a result of a student using them in an odd way or if they were broken "out of the box." Given that in previous years we've had zero issues and this year we've had 8, I am wondering if it is a manufacturing problem or some new bug in the software.
Can you please provide suggestions for further diagnosing or fixing these boards? If not, we'll plan to return them.
Thanks!
Maggie