LED Driver Circut

static.. lol... rub some. fuzzy sweaters together in the dark. and then pull them apart slowly.. good fun

thx. ill report back

My impression from looking at the circuit is that a low at the raspberry pi causes the LED to illuminate.... while a high at the Raspberry pi causes the LED to go off.  Not sure if that is what was intended or not though.

I think your calculation has an error - there should be just over 8 mA through the optocoupler LED, not 2 mA. (3.3 - 1.4) / 220  = 8.6 mA.

So it's nowhere near as bad as you mention.

8 mA is a bit of a compromise, because it depends on how many connections there are on the Pi, since there's an overall limit. However, I guesstimated that 8 mA should be harmless. 

It's not a production circuit, I don't think it needs to be guaranteed to function for the worst case conditions, since CTR of 50% is very untypical.  

Having said that, for sure the component values can be adjusted. But I don't think from the symptom, that this is the issue. But it can be known 100% by simply shorting the 100k resistor. 

My comment was only that the circuit photographed doesn't match the schematic. The emitter of the opto is connect to the gate and the pull-down resistor is floating, not sure about ground. 

Ah, okay.  Gotcha.

Oh, you're right, I messed up the calculation. My bad, my statement is wrong! With 8mA of led drive it should work indeed 

I put the original circuit on a breadboard and it works using pwm commands. MOSFETS are fine.. No leakage. (no sparksl). I'm thinking I should use a bigger perforated board to separate the components further away.  the boards are such crap, any suggestions on that.

Separate question. I will be using a start up service to activate the Py led driver,  I will use "try", "while true", and "except KeyboardInterrupt" to put my driver in a loop. there will be no keyboard connected.. will that be an issue? also can i add an "if" statement that will acknowledged input from a button? 

Read the comments posted by Scottiebabe about a possible wiring error and inconsistency between schematic and protoboard wiring.

Perfboard is about as decent a prototyping solution as there is, before moving to a full printed circuit board. 

Having said that, there is some slightly nicer perfboard than the low-cost Amazon ones. I like this one: https://www.newark.com/roth-elektronik/re200-c3/prototyping-brd-eurocard-100-2x160/dp/05M1075?ost=re200-c3 it's a decent price, and  is a large size (160 x 100mm) easy to break into a smaller piece if required, and the pads are not too large, which is occasionally helpful, plus quick to desolder and re-work, since the pads are not through-hole plated (the green board in your photo is through-hole plated which is inherently more robust, but non-through hole boards can be reliable too).

A custom PCB is low-cost, and would be worth trying, although there's a learning curve (but not much; a week of tutorials/practice for a couple of hours each day would be enough to learn say KiCad https://www.kicad.org/ ; I can recommend a video if you wish to go that route).