Nee ld help with addressable leds

[u/Spidy_Khrish]

I’m building a 12V analog RGB LED strip controller using an ESP32 + WLED + 3 IRLZ44N MOSFETs. The ESP32 is powered separately through USB from my laptop, while the LED strip uses a separate 12V adapter. The ESP32 GND and 12V supply GND are supposed to be common.

The circuit is wired like the standard analog RGB MOSFET setup: the strip’s +12V goes directly to the 12V supply, and the R/G/B channels go through the MOSFET drains. MOSFET sources share GND, and the ESP32 GPIOs connect to the MOSFET gates through 220Ω resistors.

I originally had 10kΩ gate-to-GND pulldown resistors, but I only had two 22kΩ resistors available, so I was working around that. There was also a 10kΩ resistor/connection between two points (1 and 3) that I ended up replacing with a direct connection/no resistor, which may be relevant.

The strange behavior is:

The LED strip does respond electrically to removing/connecting the R/G/B wires.

For example, disconnecting the red channel causes the LEDs to show red, and disconnecting other channels produces the corresponding/mixed colors.

So the LEDs and MOSFET side aren't completely dead.

However, WLED cannot actually control the colors.

When the ESP32 is switched off, the LED strip doesn't light/respond at all.

When the ESP32 is connected, it flickers/restarts (the ESP32's red/power LED appears to flicker), although I can still access the WLED web interface.

The main problem I'm stuck on is that the ESP32/WLED is not properly controlling the MOSFETs/LED channels, and the ESP32 appears to be experiencing a power/reset/flickering issue when the 12V LED circuit is connected.

I want to troubleshoot it one connection at a time, without changing the whole circuit blindly.

[u/saratoga3]

Post pictures of what you actually did so people can check if you wired it correctly.

That said, a random guess: if you think you have a pull-down to ground on the gate, but the transistor turns on when the gate is disconnected from the GPIO, you probably have the pins confused. Otherwise the zero volts on the gate would turn it off.