Plug n Play WLED Controller: 5v, 12v, 24v Compatible! Full Walkthrough.

so with wled becoming extremely popular it was only a matter of time before more companies caught on and started offering Products that come pre-installed with wled and available to buy on Amazon like this new offering from Eric City and in this video I'll show you how to use this product to quickly get up and running with some 12volt ws2815 strips 12volt ws2811 cob lights and 5volt sk6812 LEDs now opening things up the only thing that's included is the controller itself plus the sticky pad for mounting and one thing I do want to quickly point out is that this controller does Port 5 12 or 24 volt strips so I'll make sure to leave links in the description clearly categorizing what power supply you should get depending on the type of strip you're using now taking a closer look this is a sound react version that comes with an onboard mic built into the board it's using an esp32 chip it has two separate data outputs for your LED strips and the ability to power things via a barrel plug or bear wires and speaking of wires they're using push type connectors I know it's hard to see but as I'm pressing down on top hopefully you can get a glimpse of the little window opening and closing which is where the wires will be placed so let's first start out with the 12vt ws2815 LEDs from BTF lighting these are very similar to the 5volt ws2812b strips but being that these are 12vt if you're doing a big project you won't have to have as many power injection points the strip also offers an additional backup data line which is right here to go along with the normal ground regular data and voltage they also have these little black arrows that you'll find on all these types of addressable strips that indicate what direction the data is Flowing that always has to be going in the same direction which is away from the controller so moving on all these lights will usually come with a separate jst connector that you can attach to the beginning like I'm doing here once done I'll then strip back all four wires and since these wires are pretty thin I generally like to bend them once to make things a little bit more rigid and easier to work with when using push connectors and moving over to the controller I'll be using the gpio 16 input and inserting the white ground wire into the G opening I'll then combine the backup data wire with the regular data line before inserting into the D slot and then the red voltage will go into the V opening next for power since these are 12volt LED strips I'll be using a 12volt 10 amp Supply that should be more than enough to drive a good amount of these lights the connection process is the same as always open up Wi-Fi look for the W leed-ap Network and if it asks for a password put in w1234 and if you're somewhere that doesn't have available Wi-Fi like perhaps at a cabin or Festival hit to the controls and you're ready to go since you're currently already directly connected to the module's Wi-Fi access point but if you're at home I'll generally always connect it to my home network to do this click on Wi-Fi settings enter in your network name put in your password and further down you don't have to do this but I usually like to put something here to make it easy to remember if I ever want to connect via web browser and not the app hit save and then make sure to reconnect your device back to your home network now go ahead and download and open up the wled app hit the plus icon scan for devices and connect to the one we just set up next we need to go into configure and then LED preferences and since we are using the jst Clips in the setup I'm going to keep my brightness limiter set to 4,000 mamps which is about what most of these connectors are rated for then further down since we are using the ws2815 LEDs we can keep the strip type set to WS 281 X gpio is already defaulted to 16 which is what we used but if you did connect this to the GPI 2 on the controller you would change this to two and we currently have 300 LEDs on this strip so put that number here scroll up and hit save and all the light should now be lit instead of the first 30 that it defaults to initially there's also a button on this controller that one push turns lights on and off and a long press will cycle through different colors but this button can be reprogrammed to activate any presets you've saved 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 Ora was able to find 30 such instances of my personal information being in the hands of these companies then with one click Ora sends out a notice to have my information removed from their systems which they are legally required to do when asked their all-in-one platform offers antivirus protection credit monitoring credit lock financial transaction alerts secure VPN identity protection parental controls 24/7 us-based customer service and much much more 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 now have a little fun I want to see how well this controller does when adding a lot more lights I'll connect another roll to the end of the current one I'm then going to connect a new 5 m strip to our second data output which is gpo2 plus add another 5 m to the end of that once everything's plugged in go to LED preferences and I first need to change the length of data output 16 to 600 then a little further down hit the plus icon to add another data output here we need to put two in the gpio field as well as setting the length to 600 I'm going to keep the brightness limiter set to 4,000 milliamp and hit save so at this point we do have a good amount of LEDs connected 1 12200 to be exact and one thing I love about the W LED software is that when you have the limiter set it will automatically adjust the brightness levels across the entire run to give you the best results possible I'll turn off all the lights since it is hard to see anything right now after which you should be able to see how all four rolls are evenly lit with no visible voltage drop at any point and obviously these aren't running at Max brightness but for pretty much all my projects I'm simply trying to create some cool ambient lighting for which this level of brightness would be perfectly acceptable to me and as I'm going through some different animations keep in mind that if you're wanting to test out things for more than a minute or so you really should take the strips out of the Roll because they're going to heat up fast if you don't not to mention it's hard to get a good idea of what the effects are doing when still wound up moving on let's turn our attention to the Ws 201811 cob LEDs these offer an astounding 720 LEDs per meter or 3600 for a 5 m roll like I have here I have the 12vt version but they're also available in 24 with these you're able to control the LEDs in groups of 36 which equals 100 zones over the entire run now these are wrapped where the end of the strip is on the outside of the Roll if this was the beginning the arrows on the Strip right here would be going in the other direction so I'll get these unravel to better access the starting point and just like before I'm going to take the included extra jst connector and plug it into the beginning now it does look like the already exposed wires might be long enough as is so let's just try things to see if it's able to clamp down without needing to strip them back anymore bring things in for a closer look and thankfully the wires were able to clamp down as is I can now plug the power supply in and I'll be using the same 12volt unit that I did with the Ws 2815 strips and as far as the app going to LED preferences and we need to update the number of LEDs to 100 which is the total number of controllable zones and then for this particular strip I need to change the color order from grb to RGB hit save and you're up and running these really are amazing and even though they've been around for a bit they're finally at a price point that's not too crazy I already have a couple project s in mind that'll be starting here soon using these so make sure to be on the lookout for those in the near future finally let's go over getting some sk6812 lights up and running and these are the same lights that I use for my gaming setup that turned out great which I'll leave a link to in the description in case you're interested in watching that complete transformation so the thing that's special about the sk6812 strips is that they come with a separate dedicated white diode so these are much better at producing a good-looking white compared to the popular ws2812b variant now with these the beginning of the strip is on the outside so I'm going to quickly get the jst connector attached and get the three wires connected to the controller and as you can see this is the same three wire configuration as the cob lights from the previous example now for this since these are 5volt LEDs you can't use the 12volt power supply from before so make sure to use a 5volt brick I'll be using a 5volt 10 amp Supply which I'll leave a link to along with everything else in the description once plugged in and connected back in LED preferences I need to change the LED strip type to sk6812 rgbw from the drop down and since these again are individually addressable meaning every light on this strip can be controlled I need to change the length to 300 and the color order to grb hit save and you're all set now since it's not very fun seeing animations and effects like this or like this I'm going to get these set up on this wooden circular design that I made just a couple weeks ago and if you think this looks cool and perhaps want to try making it yourself be sure to check out the complete walkthrough I made on this project but as I'm getting things set up and before the end results I'll leave you with some final thoughts on this new controller as for some of the things I liked it's awesome that it supports 5 12 and 24 volt products and even though I used LED strips in this video make panels would work just as good I like the small form factor the enclosed housing I like that a lower pric esp8266 version is available and I like that it has free shipping plus free returns the biggest question mark however with all these types of small companies is around inventory they always seem to sell out quickly and restocking can take months so we'll have to keep an eye on that now that about does it for this one thank you all for watching and I hope you enjoy some of the final [Music] footage [Music] check check test test one 2 [Music] 1 [Music] oh 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Channel: Chris Maher

Views: 49,058

Keywords: wled to esp8266, wled controller, wled to esp32, wled led strips, esp32 led strip control, wled setup, wled esp32, easy wled, wled for beginners, wled easy setup, esp32 wled, connecting leds to esp32, cob led strip, wled cob led, cob light setup, 12v led light strip, wled 5v vs 12v, ws2815, ws2815 wiring, ws2815 led strip controller, ws2815 vs sk6812, wled ws2815, wled sk6812 rgbw, wled esp32 sk6812, chris maher, sk6812 wled, wled sound reactive, ericsity wled

Id: UTzR8GmZelU

Length: 10min 7sec (607 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 19 2024