What's important to check here is to see if there are *additional* connections between any of those points and GND or VCC, or possibly other pins on the chip. If one of those pins is hooked right to another, or to one of the power supply rails, then the chip could be badly strained, leading to what you see now.

would such an connection be visable?
I noticed that when i measure some pins (quite many) to vcc or gnd the resistance keeps going up. is that normal?

>would such an connection be visable?

Possibly-- the most likely circumstance would be a "solder blob," an accidental connection from having too much solder somewhere. More likely, you would only see it with the multimeter.

>I noticed that when i measure some pins (quite many) to vcc or gnd the resistance keeps going up.

That's indicative of a capacitor somewhere charging up. Likely normal. What you're looking for is an accidental connection between a pin and something else-- if it's there, it will have constant, low resistance.

Howzabout pictures of the solder joints and/or installation? It may be that having a second set of eyes looking at the installation/joints could provide insight as to where the problem may lie...

Just a suggestion...

what do you mean by "an accidental connection between a pin and something else" should i check every pin with everything else? sorry if i ask stupid questions, im new to electronics. thanks, J

Yes, as I said: you should check every pin to see if it's connected to its neighbors, or to GND, or VCC, *especially* if it shouldn't be!

Okay, i did that, no neighbors connected that shouldn't be, no pins connected to vcc or gnd that shouldn't be. Might it be some issue with the matrix?

>Might it be some issue with the matrix?

Yes, could be. But it would have to be that one type of the LED chips inside was made with a different spec-- there's not a single short circuit location (for example) that could cause something like this-- there are 192 independent LED elements in there. I can check our latest batch of matrices here and see if anything is amiss. The other thing that it could be is that one of the LED driver chips was damaged somehow.

It may be possible to compensate by altering one or both of the resistor values R2 and R1, to give proportionately more current to the red LEDs.

>Might it be some issue with the matrix?

And... yes, indeed, it is. I've just checked the matrices that we have in stock, and they have indeed changed without notice. So, I must apologize-- it seems that your assembly was flawless.

There is some good news, however, which is that red LEDs are not dimmer than before-- the change is that the green LED-- which has always been the weakest in the RGB modules --is now much, much brighter. We can "fix" this by turning down the relative brightness of the green elements-- saving plenty of power in the process. Please try replacing the MeggyJr.h file in your Arduino library with the attached MeggyJr.h file.

Edit: Tried to leave attachment, not visible. I'll add this to our google code site momentarily.

Edit 2: File is here:
http://code.google.com/p/meggy-jr-rgb/downloads/detail?name=MeggyJr.h

Wow, it worked! thanks alot!
and no problem, was a good multimeter training
J.