Using WS2812b RGB Light Strips

hi today i want to cover something i really haven't talked about in many of my other led related projects and that is the led strips themselves so hang around [Music] i've done a lot of led projects around the house and i've made a number of videos on how to do these projects yourself but those videos tend to focus on the controller or the firmware or how to integrate those into home assistant or other automation platforms and what i really haven't done is focus on the led strips themselves so based on some of the questions i've received today i'm going to talk about how you cut these solder them where when and how to do power injection and basically focus on the led strips themselves including how you connect them to the controller and the power supply at the very end i'll also answer some of the more common questions that i've received so led strips come in a lot of different flavors and varieties there's 5 volt 12 volt even 24 volt digital analog rgb rgbw clocklist spi the list goes on and on but one of the most common and the one i use in most of my projects is the ws2812b they're relatively inexpensive they are rgb strip 5 volts and i'm going to show you a number of different techniques and these techniques could generally be applied to just about any type of led strip every once in a while there's something to be slightly different like with 12 volt or only every 3 pixels are the same color you can't necessarily cut every pixel but for the most part what i'm going to show you today can be applied to any type of led strip so let's start out by digging into the ws2812b so these are the ws2812b pixel strips and pretty much what i've used in all of my projects now they are five volt clocklist which means they're powered by five volts and they only need one data wire so you'll have three wires running to the strip your five volt plus and minus and one data wire they generally come in either one meter uh which is about 3.3 feet or five meter about 16.4 feet lengths but even with it within the ws2812 there are a lot of variety for one thing here you can see that they come either black or white uh they come in different waterproof standards these are actually ip30 which are meant for indoor use only but you can get them in ip65 or ip67 that will really come with a silicone sleeve to help protect them from water more importantly they come in different numbers of pixels per meter these top two are 60 pixels per meter so you'll get 60 individual lights for every meter of length down at the bottom these are 100 pixels per meter so you might want to use those in a situation where you need really bright light some maybe like task lighting but obviously your power draw is going to be a lot higher with these they also come in 30 pixels per meter which i don't uh have any up here but just look at the 60 and basically it would be every other pixel for the 30 pixels per meter the nice thing is that these strips can be cut to any length it would be very rare that you would need exactly one meter or exactly five meters in length for your project so the fact that we can cut these to any needed length and then actually join individual strips together is what we're going to cover next cutting these strips are extremely easy and all you need is a good pair of scissors a couple of things to note however if you take a look at these strips especially the longer strips what you're going to see is you're going to see a solder joint about every half well exactly every half meter so for 60 pixels per meter every 30 pixels is going to be the solder joint it would be every 50 pixels on the 100 pixels per meter you generally want to try to avoid avoid cutting the strip across these solder joints now you can but really if at all possible in your project try to avoid those if you look you'll see a white line meaning these can be cut anywhere along those white lines now if you're using 12 volt pixels they may have every three pixels where you can cut them but for these ws2812b which is what we're going to talk about today these can be cut anywhere if you are using the waterproof version the ip65 or ip67 you may need to carefully slice that outer uh silicone sleeve and peel that back then reseal it up afterwards all you really need to do is try to cut these right in the middle between two pads so we have a little bit of pad left on each piece i'm just gonna cut right through that and there you go and you'll see we still have copper pad on this end and we have copper pad on that end which is going to allow us to join our connectors one other important thing to note and this will bite you sometime it's bit me dozens of times while your power can flow either direction your data only flows one direction and that direction is indicated by these arrows that you see on the led strip so our data is going to come in one end of the strip and go out the other if you don't careful when you're doing your connectors you'll either end up with something like this where you see our data arrows are pointed get that in focus data arrows are pointed at each other that's not going to work or the data arrows are pointed away from each other and again that's not going to work so we need to make sure whenever we're doing any kind of connections we keep that data flow in mind from one strip to the next but once you've cut your strips you're going to need connectors or a way to get your power and your data signal into the led strip now the strips generally come pre-packaged with a connector at the beginning and the end of the strip so but you can see this is pretty bulky and if you're trying to install this where they're really flat you can either peel this back and desolder the wires or simply cut off that first pixel because again these are going to come with wires for power injection which you may or may not need and we'll talk about that in a little bit and while you could certainly solder your wiring from your controller your power supply directly on into your led strip i highly recommend the use of these jst connectors it allows you to easily connect and disconnect your led strip from your controller and power supply should you need to work on it or move move anything around now note that these do also come in female and male versions and the standard convention is that you use the female on the data inline in the mail on the data outline if you don't create your own standards at some point likes happened to me many times you'll find out you need to connect your strips together and you end up with two male ends trying to connect together which isn't going to work ideal in every situation you've got a tight corner or need to join two strips together in a channel you may or may not want to use these and i'll talk about that in just a minute but since this is our data in line you could tell by the arrows let's solder one of these female jst connectors into our incoming side of our led strip to connect our jst connector to our led strips we're going to put just a pretend these pads just a little bit with just a tiny bit of solder i like to use a little bit of a no clean flux on this just to make things flow a little bit better so put a little bit of that on there and then we're going to gently touch this to the pad itself you want to be a little careful here because too much heat and you can actually melt the led strip so it doesn't take a lot okay there you go so now that those are pretend all we've got to do is take our jst connector and these generally come pretend as well so we don't have to add any solder to these but if you are using your own wiring you will want to pretend your end of your slips the other thing to notice is if you look very carefully here if i can get this in focus you'll notice 5 volt data and ground so make sure that you've got your wire in the right spot we're actually going to do this end so on our data end our ground is going to be the top data and 5 volt on the bottom so again we're gonna go white green and red this is very easy as well again all we do is take our solder pin our soldering iron and basically just touch this right to the top and melt that in there okay and we repeat for the data and our five volt positive five volt so that's it we now have a connection for our data in and you'll repeat this again using the mail into this on any data out in the female on any data in so if you have a situation where you either can't or don't want to use jst connectors but need to join two segments of an led strip together we can do that by just soldering them to each other again make sure you're noting the data line and if you have the data lined up properly ground should be opposite of ground data and 5 volts so what we're going to do in this case is we're going to peel back maybe a little bit of the backing here to expose some of the adhesive not a lot just enough to kind of hold it in place make this as flat as possible we're going to stick that down to our surface and then we're going to do the same thing on this side peel a little bit back and then we want to just very slightly line up and overlap these two pieces and press them down okay once we have those in place we're gonna do the same thing we do with the wire i'm gonna add a little bit of flux here for that and then again take our soldering iron and we're going to apply solder heat that up and kind of drag the solder back across a little bit more there there we go didn't get it across that third one there we go so we just let that cool for just a second we can gently peel this back up push these back down and now we have the two strips joined together so there are alternatives in terms of joining strips as opposed to soldering you can actually buy strip connectors basically just make sure that you buy or buying the right ones for your particular strip but the idea here is you just simply insert the two ends of your strip snap these down they puncture the strip and make connections to be honest i've not used these i don't know how well they work they also come in 90 degree angles for for joining strips at a corner i prefer to solder solder my strips together but these are are an option if you either don't or don't have soldering equipment or prefer not to the next what if you have a situation like this where you need to create a 90 degree angle now again you can use uh the pre-built connectors they come in 90 90 degrees as well but the one thing about these strips is while they do have some some flexibility this way they really don't have the ability to bend in in this direction now i've seen people that have come around and they've wrapped these things around to do things like this but to be honest the wiring in here between these pixels is pretty thin and pretty delicate so you're not going to be able to to make a sharp 90 degree angle with just the strips themselves so of course your alternative is to run short pieces of wire between your two strips and here's an example of a place where i did that this is my 3d printed led clock and you can can see in here there is a a whole bunch of led to led connections and i tended to use solid wire here just to keep it in place between there but really using this kind of technique between jst connectors soldering strips directly together or using short wiring runs you can create leds in just about any shape or size that you need for your project so once you have all of your strips built and soldered and put together in whatever pattern you're using you're going to need a way to connect your strip both to your five volt power supply and your led controller now generally what i like to do is i like to take a male this should be female because again remember that's your data end i'll take a mail jst connector and then modify it i will usually use a spade connector or some other kind of clip here for our data that's going to connect the data line coming out of our controller and then for my 5 volts positive and negative i usually just extend the wire to however long that i need to that and then on the end i will generally use these lego clips that i can then connect directly to our five volt power supply if i need to do power injection along the way again i can step up to a three or even a five connector and i can run each of my power injection points back to this i'm going to talk about power injection in just a couple minutes so the advantage of of wiring it up this way is that i can easily when i'm ready connect my led strips to my power and my controller and for some reason i need to disconnect these strips for whatever reason for my controller i can simply disconnect it and move it so that way i never have to remove my permanently installed leds if i've got them tucked away or mounted somewhere i can always disconnect uh the power and the controller if i need to work on that that's to me it's much more convenient than doing a direct wire uh to the led strip although that is certainly possible so i've covered this in other videos but i just briefly want to touch on it here and that's about mounting your leds your led strips as i mentioned they do have a peel off adhesive backing on these so it is possible to just stick them to a surface but i will tell you that that adhesive is not the strongest in the world and if you're going to mount these up in a surface just because the little bit of heat that these produce eventually they're probably going to sag and start coming loose and that's going to be annoying so my mounting option of choice is i love to use this led aluminum channel you can buy this online again links will be down below but your led strips fit nicely into this strip it also comes with a diffuser that will simply snap on over the top but again that that doesn't really again if they're hanging upside down there's still a possibility of this adhesive coming loose over time so the thing that i like to do is i like to take a little bit of this double-sided 3m tape it's basically the same width as the led strip i will lay that down inside my channel peel that back peel out the backing off of this and then stick these together inside of this channel and i've had extremely good luck with that without those coming loose you can also get this channel in a 90 degree so that your leds will basically be pointing down at a 45 degree angle so there there are various options for that but i do like to mount my strips whenever possible inside this aluminum channel with some double-sided tape just to ensure that they're not going to come loose over time so one other thing we need to talk about is voltage drop and power injection now what i mean by voltage drop is at the start of your strip you have five volts coming in as you go down the strip lighting each pixel the voltage is going to get slightly less and less just due to resistance so eventually what's going to happen is the voltage is going to drop low enough there won't be enough power to fully light up the pixels now for anything any installs i'd say about 100 pixels or less you're probably not going to have to worry about power injection there'll still be enough voltage at the end to light those last pixels once you start getting above 100 maybe 150 pixels you'll start noticing the lights are going to dim and they're going to start fading in terms of their colors towards a red so let me show you an example okay what i've done here to demonstrate our voltage drop is i've just got a short strip of 32 pixels hooked up here and again the controller and the power supply are off to the side here but i'm going to go ahead and measure the actual power supply if i can get my arm out of the way here you see we're about 4.9 volts after after a little bit of drop already just from the wiring but after 32 pixels for 4.9 let's measure the voltage after 32 pixels again this is on full bright white there we go we can see we've already dropped to 4.7 volts and that's after just 32 pixels so let me replace this 32 pixel with 100 pixels and take another look okay so now it's the same scenario except this time i've hooked up 100 pixels which is on full bright white so let's see where we are here technically i'll be measuring after 99 pixels let's see where our voltage is at all right you can see our voltage has already dropped to three and a half volts from our original 4.9 at the power supply so it's not going to take much longer before the voltage drop is going to be enough that we're going to start seeing it impact the color and the brightness of the leds okay finally i've hooked up 200 leds and you may not be able to see it in the video but by the time we're at the end of this strip these have started to fade to a pinkish color and they're not nearly as bright let's take a look and see what our voltage is at now after 200 leds there we go you can see we've now dropped to 2.2.6 volts and it's definitely impacting the color and the brightness of the leds at the end of this strip so once we're up this far we definitely need to look at power injection you can pretty much add power injection anywhere along the strip that you feel like you need it and the process is much the same as it is with the jst connectors in this case i've already added a little solder pre-soldered my ground and my 5 volt i don't need solder for the data pin because we're not going to be adding data at this point but it's much the same as jst connector again i've pre-tend or added a little bit of solder into the wire and and we'll repeat for the five volt on this side again just enough heat to melt that solder and get those to stick together there we go and with that we now have the ability to inject power along our strip i generally like to put some kind of connectors on into this i might use lego clips or spade connectors but something that i can again disconnect uh the power completely from the strips if i need to do any work or just to make the wiring runs easier but here's a simple way to add power injection and again you can do that anywhere along the strip that it's needed let me finish up by answering some of the most common questions i've received around my led projects and probably one of the most common questions is what size power supply do i need well obviously you're going to need voltage that matches your strips in the case of ws2812 you're going to need a 5 volt power supply but the question is what kind of amps does that power supply need to be able to provide that's going to be strictly dependent on the number of led pixels that you've got as a general rule of thumb you can estimate that each pixel on full bright white will pull up to 60 milliamps so 0.060 amps so all you have to do is take the number of pixels that you've got multiplied by .06 to get an estimated amount of current that you're going to need in your power supply so let me give you an example i'm going to use my little phone down here as a calculator let's say you've got 132 pixels total in your total installation we multiply that by .06 and it gives us 7.92 that's the minimum amount of current that we would need with our power supply now you're generally going to want to round up the controller is going to draw a little bit and you generally never want to drive a power supply at its maximum amp rating for an extended period of time so with 132 pixels i would recommend a 10 amp 10 amp five volt power supply okay let's try another one let's just say we've got 45 pixels times .06 that's 2.7 amps that would be required you could probably get away with a 3 amp power supply i would probably go with 5 amp i'd round up just a little bit to give me that little bit of extra headroom so again the number of amps that you're going to need is dependent upon the number of pixels now as far as the power supply themselves up to about 10 amps you might be able to find a little higher you can probably get away with these with these little brick power supplies this one actually happens to be a 5 volt 10 amp once you get much higher than about 10 amps then you're going to have to look more at what i call these transformer style of power supplies and again this is 5 volt i think this one is 30 amp if i remember right and you can go way up in terms of you know 60 70 amp power supplies in in this style so again what you need to do is calculate your number of pixels times .06 round up to the next highest number that you can find and that's the size you need to use for your project another question i received is can i just run my led strips off the five volt pin off of my controller well you just saw we calculated about amps needed and i will tell you that the maximum throughput in terms of amps on the pins of of these esp8266 chips is only 500 milliamps so you know if you calculate that out that's about 8 pixels so if your install is 8 pixels or less total yeah you probably could power power off of this chip but in most cases you're not going to do that and the related question is well can i just run the power through through my uh prototype board to this electro cookie board well these things i couldn't find an actual standard uh listed for these but i would be really hesitant to put anything more than a couple of amps through this through this board just because the you know the traces are so thin and even if you say 2 amps you might be able to to do up to 30 35 pixels tops running through this so really what you want to do is you want to always power your led strips independently of your controller now you can use the same power supply and you must have a common ground so let me show you a quick diagram here so this is pretty much how i wire up every one of my wled installs this is the controller down here and again i've got a a separate video on the step-by-step process on building your own led controller and i'll put a link up up towards the top of the screen that you can see but here's our 5 volt power supply and you'll notice that i'm feeding 5 volts to the controller but then 5 volts separately to the the power strip and then the data signal is coming in here off of our controller and again if you need to do power injection you just simply come off of this same again using i'm just showing juego clips here but you can run separate positive and negative off of these same connections and do power injection down your strip so this is the way i pretty much do all of my installs and it avoids running the current needed for the led strips through either the controller or through the prototype board i also often get asked will you build me one especially when it comes to the led controllers and you know as much as i would like to be able to i have to decline for one thing the purpose of this channel is is to teach you so that you can do it yourself and to be honest i just really don't have the time to build and and ship and keep track of the logistics and all that kind of stuff but if you are interested in a pre-built led controller up here in the corner of the screen is called a dig uno uh by quindor over at quinn led i'll leave a link down below for that and i also even have here myself i've used that uh i actually use this uh did you know on my christmas tree and this is actually a ditch quad this actually has four separate led output channels uh it's fused handles a lot of voltage and again i'll leave a link to that but you know if you are interested or you don't want to build your own led controller you can buy one of these ditch boards and really all you have to do is hook up your power supply and hook up your led strips and and you're done and finally a few of you out there have been very kind to ask how you might support my channel i've said this in other videos my goal here isn't to make a ton of money and get rich off of youtube really it's about giving back to the community and getting people excited about home automation and diy electronics so there are a couple of ways if you want to support my channel neither of which cost you any money one is to hit that subscribe button by hitting that subscribe button you kind of let me know that you want to see more videos like this and you kind of keep me motivated the other way is to make use of my amazon affiliate links i usually post links to the parts that i use either in the video description or related blog and when you order it via these amazon affiliate links it doesn't cost you a dime but i make a few pennies here and there that i put towards future projects for future videos that i can share with you so i'm going to bring the video to a close i want to wish everyone a very happy holiday season i hope to be back probably new year's weekend with my next video so thanks for watching and we hope to see you again soon

Channel: ResinChem Tech

Views: 24,073

Keywords: WS2812b, LED strips, DIY RGB Lighting

Id: GZjS51yBV4s

Length: 27min 19sec (1639 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 19 2021