Flexible Neon Tube - Review, Installation, Best WLED Animations - LED Neon Strip Lights

so I get a lot of questions about flexible neon tubing and up until this point I really haven't had much experience with them and no experience at all with what I would consider to be the string your own strip type but the time has come to take a closer look at this type of product to see if it really is a game changer or if I'll be sticking to my normal straight line diffuser channels to get things started let's take a closer look at the accessories it comes with two different types of end caps one with the hole to feed the wires out if needed and one that doesn't have the opening next you have your drywall anchors and screws that can be used to secure the aluminum clip in place where the tubing can clamp in and finally I have five meters of the silicone diffuser material so if you've never seen something like this before the bottom part where the string is coming out is where you'll insert the LED strip and right here is where the light will shine through the first thing I want to cover is what to do if you want to cut them down to size I found for this that a simple utility knife worked best and if you do lose the string in the process it is pretty easy to fish it out using a small pliers but I will go over a different way you can go about getting the LEDs inserted that does not require the string later on in the video now forgetting the LED strip inserted I found that two feet is about the max I could do with just pushing it through on one end this worked for both the 60 and 100 LED per meter strip that I tried so before going over the string method I didn't want to touch on a different approach that you could use to install the strip I noticed at the bottom of the silicone tubing was pretty thick and rigid and I wondered what would happen if I simply cut an incision right down the middle of being careful not to go too deep and then just insert the LEDs from underneath and sure enough when you split it open it would go back and hold its shape when you let go it does take a little bit of patience but it's not that difficult to get the strip into place using this method and could easily be done for the entire 5 meters [Music] next let's go over the traditional string application I'm going to wrap things behind the first led on the strip and then I'll be tying a knot on the bottom like this [Music] now you want to lay everything out as straight as possible and it does recommend that you have two people for this but I'm going to give it a go by myself from here it's just pulling on the exposed string from the other side and making sure things are not catching up front it actually went surprisingly smooth even without any help and even though this leftover section was three meters long it was still smooth sailing right at the end so I don't think an extra two meters would have been that difficult if I did have the entire length now before moving on I want to thank the sponsor of today's video Aura so this is me signing up for their free 14-day trial and during the setup process one of the many things they do is scan the internet for data Brokers that have your personal information these data Brokers then make a fortune selling your information to spammers scammers and other entities that want to know more about you now Aura was able to find 30 such instances of my personal information being in the hands of these companies then with one click Aura sends out a notice to have my information removed from their systems which they are legally required to do when asked now this just scratches the surface of what they're able to do as they are the number one rated One-Stop solution to keep you and your family safe from cyber criminals they're all in one platform offers anti-virus protection credit monitoring credit lock financial transaction alerts secure VPN identity protection parental controls 24 7 us-based customer service and much much more they have an A plus rating with a Better Business Bureau and have been featured on Wall Street Journal Bloomberg Forbes money and security.org to name a few I'll leave a link in the description for you to start your own free 14-day trial so please make sure to check them out thank you all so much and now back to the video so to get these set up I'm going to be using the metal brackets it comes with but if you're like me and don't want to fully commit to a design by screwing these into your wall or maybe you're renting and it's not allowed I'd recommend just using some 3M removable wall strips like you're seeing here now I kind of have a Rolling Hills type design in mind so I'm going to first place these brackets with the 3M tape on the wall where I Envision things will look good after the neon tubing is installed once I have the first set secured I'm going to be measuring down six inches and doing the exact same thing once those are in I'll be measuring down another six inches and repeating now one thing I did want to mention is that I really would only use these if you wanted some type of curve or bend in your design if all you're going for is a straight line then I would just use the regular aluminum diffuser channels so now I'm going to take the one neon tube that I completed earlier in the video using the string method and install it into the top brackets now for reference this section is about three meters long and I'm using some SK 6812 strips that have 60 LEDs per meter I then made a couple more identical sections of neon tubing and lights to complete the design and as a reminder I'll leave links in the description to everything that I'm using in this video so make sure to check those out if you're interested so as far as the actual wiring setup what you're looking at is the beginning of all three sections I've soldered my own 18 gauge silicone wires to the strips and I did make a soldering for beginners video that you can watch if you're curious on how that's done since it is one of the things I cover now I did use all white wires so to make it easier for me to get things connected down the road I Mark the voltage wire with red ground with black and I left the data line blank you can use any color wire that you want but depending on what you want to do to hide everything at least for me white wires are going to blend in better with my walls so that's what I'm using next is the esp32 board which already has W LED installed I'll leave a link in the description to the video I already made walking you through those easy steps if it's something you have questions on I'll also be using some 20 gauge jumper wires that have one male and one female end to get things connected and again color doesn't matter but I'll try to keep things consistent so it's easier to follow along I'm going to take my red jumper wire and plug it into the VIN pin on the module next I'll take the white one and insert it into the gnd pin right next to it I'm going to do things a little bit differently for my normal setups in terms of the data lines you certainly don't have to do it this way but I'm to plug one green jumper wire into the D2 pin another one into the D4 pin and a third into the D5 pin now the amount of LEDs that I have total for this build which is a little under 600 would run just fine on one pin but I wanted to try something different this time so that's why I'm doing it this way and to connect all the wires we're dealing with together I'll use a couple five slot wiggle pieces and three two slot pieces for power I'll be using this BTF lighting 5 volt 20 amp unit the three wires on the left black for live white for neutral and green for ground go to my wall outlet the white wire in the middle is connected to one of the negative posts and the red wire on the right is connected to a positive terminal go ahead and connect your two five slot wiggle pieces to these two wires now all you have to do is take each LED strip and find the one voltage wire that we marked red and plug it into the positive wiggle connector and then take the ground cable that we marked black and plug it into the negative wiggle piece and then do this for the other two LED strips we should now have three white unmarked wires left coming from the three LED strips which are data lines use a two slot connector and put one on each of those three wires next take the esp32 device and connect the three green male ends of the jumper wires connected to the board to the three wiggle pieces that are connected to the data of the LED strips foreign ly take the red Vin jumper wire from the ESP and hook it up to the last remaining slot of the wiggle connector from the positive terminal on the power supply and then do the same with the white gnd jumper wire from the ESP to the last open slot on the wiggle piece connected to the negative post on the power unit now before plugging things in a lot of these types of power supplies have a switch somewhere to toggle between 110 and 220 volts and if you're located in the US make sure it's set to 110 since that's what the vast majority of Home Outlets are wired to so now that we have everything plugged in I'm going to open up the wled app I've already scanned for available devices by hitting the plus icon near the top right and the bottom one that says wled is the controller that we just set up so go ahead and click to open next click on configure and then into LED preferences I'm first going to set the brightness limiter to 7000 milliamps now scroll further down and under hardware setup it defaults to ws281x so I need to go in and change that to SK 6812 which are the lights that I'm using further down under gpio I've noticed recently it defaults to 16 when you install wled onto the board and if you remember from before I'm using the D2 D4 and D5 data pins for this build so I'm going to first change the 16 to 2 which represents the D2 pin then I'm going to put the number of LEDs that are connected to the D2 output which is connected to my top diffuser Channel and I've already counted to be 190 pixels go ahead and hit save and you'll immediately see the top channel lights turn on next go back into LED preferences and we're going to hit the plus icon under the LED outputs and do the exact same thing that we just did except this time we're going to set the gpio to 4 which represents our D4 data pin I'll hit save and then you'll see the middle lights turn on then finally go back and do the exact same thing for the D5 data pin which is connected to our bottom neon diffuser here and what's cool about this is even though the three strips are connected to three different data pins on the controller wled can still recognize this as one continuous string of lights like you'll see here on this animation now let's say you wanted the animation to go from the top strip and instead of then moving on to the beginning of the second having it start at the end you can do that by going into LED preferences and check the Reversed option for our middle strip now you can see what that does to the same animation I've had these now up for a couple weeks and I must admit I do love the change from the normal straight line diffuser channels I've really only used up until this point the smooth Rolling Hills combined with the animations from wled definitely adds a little bit of extra wow factor when watching now as far as hiding the wires controller and power supply I'll probably just end up doing what I did in this video that I already made that you can check out if interested so that about wraps things up but since I always get a lot of comments asking about the type of animations and settings that I like to use from here on out I'll just continue to play some of my favorites with the app open so you can see them in action thank you all so much for watching and as always I hope you have a blessed day oh [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] thank you foreign [Music] foreign [Music] thank you [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Chris Maher

Views: 118,573

Keywords: spotless led channel, neon led strip lights, neon led sign, neon led lights, neon led strip, neon led rope light, govee rope light ideas, govee rope lights, silicone led strip, silicone led diffuser, silicone led channel, silicone led channel system, silicone led strip installation, wled, wled setup, esp32 wled, esp8266, diffuser channel led, diy led diffuser channel, best diffuser channel, diffusing led lights, flexible neon, flexible neon light, neon led, led installation

Id: xkCt85jvI2s

Length: 13min 48sec (828 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 16 2023