I'm willing to pay $200 (not commercial)

An Infineon ILD6070 driver. This is like any other buck driver that accepts a PWM signal, and doesn’t provide any type of feedback loop. It just does whatever the PWM signal tells it to do.

Did you try the suggestions I made to eliminate the flashing?

I put the digitalWrite(ledpin, 3) before the pin is set to output and there wasn’t any change. Still a blink before going to mode 2 (30%) and then no PWM output. Any other ideas?

You need to write the pin to 0 (low output)

Ok, I understand now. I tried that just now and no change.

sounds like it must be the hardware startup timer that other users have mentioned then