Blade not lighting after wiring mistake

I accidentally wired the battery + to the +5v out pin.
It worked for a bit then the blade stopped lighting.
I fixed the wiring error.
I pressed the chassis up to the blade, may have not lined up properly, and heard a pop and saw a little smoke. Burned out LED2 and LED3 fets.
Switched to LED4 and 5.
Blade still doesn’t work. Doesn’t work in other hot either.
I disassembled the blade found a burned out led, replaced it and it still doesn’t work.

During this whole time the hilt emitter lights and all the sounds are correct.

I would test with a multimeter but I’m not sure what to look for.

How is the emitter hooked up?
Separate data line? Serial? Parallel?

Further information for debugging can be found on the pod site, I recommend starting with these pages:

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Obviously you’ve learned the lesson the hard way, but for other readers of this thread, never, never, never, never try to test a blade by holding it against the neopixel pins by hand - you WILL misalign it and you WILL do some damage. The two parts must be in a hilt or suitable tube to make sure they are aligned.

In terms of fixing it, I’m assuming you did change your config and reprogramme the Proffie to use LED pads 4 and 5? (Sorry if this is grandmother sucking eggs, but just trying to methodically go through every possibility).

If the hiltside connector is a Shtok, I believe they have polarity protection which is why it has survived. But as far as I know, most blades don’t. You say you replaced an LED on your blade. I’m assuming it was the first LED? What type of blade strips do you have? Do they allow you to move the wires to start at the second LED for positive, negative and data, thus bypassing the first LED completely? Worth a try perhaps.

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Guilty. Very good to know, and thank you.

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It took me a while to get around to working on this. Thank you everyone for the input.

To verify if it was anything on the proffieboard’s end I wired up a short 8 neopixel strip to the blade side connector. I put it all back together with the small strip and tested it, and it worked perfectly.

So, for sure it’s the blade that’s not working properly.

The neopixel strip I’m using does allow for soldering every 2 Leds. So, I did try soldering to the next set of solder pads and there was no difference.

At this point I’m looking at testing each neopixel individually but I’m having a hard time finding how.

To test for a bad pixel (bad data) along the strip, you’d just power up the strip, then have a (longish) data wire run from the board to a tinned end. Touch the data IN of the pixels in sequence one by one. When the rest of the blade lights up, you know the previous one wasn’t working.
You might need to find the pixels you have, but generally you’re looking for something like the illustration on this page:

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I finally got around to testing it this way and it worked! Turns out the first and last pixels burnt out. I replaced them and it works perfectly!

Thank you so much for your help.

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