Here are ten things that you must know
before working with LED strips so you don't waste your time
and your money. Buying LED strips can be overwhelming
because there's just a ton of options. I did an Amazon search and there were over
3000 different results, so I'm going to help you sort
through that today. and what to look for to make sure you have
a successful project. The first thing to know is
that there are better options out there. The first thing you're going to see when you search for LED light strips
are these packaged kits. Now, this little guy is under $20 for 100
feet of LED lights. And as you can imagine,
they're not very good. And if you spend more than 5 seconds
on TikTok, you've probably seen these. I think they're in the teenage
influencer starter kit. Now, there are definitely higher quality
kits out there, but they're going to cost you 3 to 4 times
as much as this cheap one. And the problem with kits, though,
is if you don't like the remote control or how they connect wi fi versus
Bluetooth, and especially if you want more LEDs per meter,
then you're really just stuck with it. So you kind of get what you get
and don't throw a fit. But I'm my own man
and I got to choose what I want. So I build my own kits. I'm building
your own kit is not that hard. You only need three basic things,
and that is the LED strips a way to control them and a way to power them,
even though there's only three components. There are a ton of options,
especially for LEDs. So the second thing you need to know
is what you want your LEDs to do. Now, obviously you're using LED lights
because you want to shed some light on things,
whether that is just white light that you're using for under cabinet
kitchen lighting, or maybe you want to add a little bit of flair
and add some color and go with an R.G. B and I'm going to put those
into two categories. Dumb BS and smart BS. Here's a quick overview
of how each of these work. Now, with the white LEDs,
pretty self-explanatory. It is just like a light bulb. You have a positive and negative lead from your power supply,
and when you turn it on, it gives you a white light
and you can increase and decrease the brightness
just like you would with a dimmer switch for a light bulb in your house
or the dome. Bees are a bit
the same, except now you're sending three signals down the path red,
green and blue. And that's what the bee stands for. But the thing is, these are not smart. So every lead on
the strip is going to be the same color. Based upon how much power you're putting
into each of the red, green and blue. So if I turn these on when it's white,
that means all of the red, green and blue are turned up all the way. But if I hit the red button now,
the red is getting full power in the green and the blue are not getting any power. So you can kind of think about it
like that, like there's three dimmer switches and depending upon how you turn them,
that's what generates the color. And then lastly, we have these smart bees. Now, these are very different. They do have a positive and a negative, but then they have a data pin
coming down the middle. And the data pin
basically is telling the light what to do. The cool thing is,
is that it can tell each individual led what to do, and that's how you can get
some really cool animations like this. So you can do some really cool things. Now this is just stock animations that are in this controller,
which I'll talk about later. But each individual led along
the way has its own instructions. So you might be thinking, can RJ bees
just do white anyway? And you are correct. But the third thing to know about these
strips is the White isn't always right. And so I've done all the LEDs here
together. Let me turn them all on. So in this first one here,
these are a dedicated white led. That's the only color does. And this is, I think, 4000 Kelvin. You can get those
in different color temperatures. And this looks really great. It's a nice pure white light. Now, in the middle here. This one is the $20 kit. And I don't know if you can see it as
good as I can, but it looks really blue. It's kind of nasty. Now, this last one
here is the smart rugby. And you can start to see some of the quality differences between it
and this cheap, dumb rugby. This white is a lot better, but it's still
not quite as nice as the pure white. So if you're thinking it'd be nice to have
RG BS, but I'm going to mainly do white. I would probably just make the decision
to go for the pure white. If you're concerned about how that is going to look
and the temperature of the light. There is one other type of led strip
that tries to get the best of both worlds, and that's an RG, b
W, and as it sounds, it combines and RG B plus A white all into one little LED cell. Now the problem with that
is that you got a lot going on there. The reviews are not great on them. It's
more to fail. And for me personally,
I just don't think it's worth it because if you're that concerned about getting a really nice natural white,
then just go with the white. And if you're not concerned,
then just go with the rugby in that white that comes off. It is going to be good enough
for most applications. I don't want to bog you down
with a bunch of model numbers, but in general, the dumb rugby
Ernie referred to as an RG be 5050 and the 5050 just refers
to the size of the LED and for the smart RG BS,
you'll see a lot of different options. You might see A, B, 28, 11, 12, B, 13 and 15 and those all have just
little different nuances. And there's a great video by the hook up
and I'll have that linked down below where he goes
through all the different options and what each of those model numbers mean. But just for the record, I use the WC 2812 B That's my go to strip
now that we know the color type. The fourth thing you need to think about is how many LEDs
do you want in a specific distance? And the measurement
that they typically do is LEDs per meter. So I have 40 strips here in front of me going from the least
up to the most amount of density of LEDs. The starting over here on your left,
and these are the dumb LEDs, and they come in that 100 foot kit
and that's two rolls of 50 feet. And the reason they can do that is because there's only 15 LEDs per meter
that like the bare minimum, and that equates to about two and a half
inch spacing in between the LEDs. So the next step up is 30 LEDs
parameter twice as much, which give you about one
and a quarter inches in between them. Then we step up to 60 LEDs per meter,
about three quarters of an inch between, and then we go all the way up to 144
LEDs per meter. This thing is just chock full of LEDs. They're like only a quarter inch apart,
and this one is the most dense. But what do you really need? Let me show you
how they look. Under diffusion. So the biggest thing with
the density of LEDs is the more you have in a smaller space, the brighter
it will be as well as the less obvious it will be that there are individual LEDs
and it will look like a constant source. And obviously the more you have per meter, the more expensive
it's going to be per meter. When we add the diffuser,
it helps blend things out. And here's how that looks. I personally my go to is the 60
LEDs per meter because I like that tighter look for the animations. But if you're just trying
to do some ambient lighting and just get a mood going,
I think the 30 per meter will be fine and you're going to save yourself
a little bit of money. All right. I think we have gotten the use
out of these dumb RG BS in this cheap kit and Richmond tossers over there. Now, as far as these black ones
right here that you saw, you may have noticed
that they looked a little bit different. And that leads into the next thing
you want to look out for, which is where are you going to be using them
in relationship to moisture in water? This is probably the easiest decision of them all because there's only three
different types of water ratings and they're pretty easy to figure out. So if you see IP 30,
that is this guy right here, which has basically no water resistance,
all the components will work. As I was saying,
the IP 30 has no water resistance whatsoever
and it is just all the exposed circuitry. So you can see
the little little pads here. And if water hit there
and crossed over those, it would shorted out
and ruined your strip. Now the next level up is IP 65
and that is water resistant. This one has a nice silicone
coating over the top of it. So if you look at it from the side, it's
kind of bulged up and is just covering all the electronics on the front side with a layer of silicone
so that the water, if you get it splashed up
there, you're going to be okay. And these would be great
for in the kitchen anywhere around a sink where it might get water
and maybe outdoors. If you were undercover,
like up on a porch or something like that. Now, the last rating is IP 67,
and that is waterproof. So these are inside a silicone casing
that is sealed. And you can see here at the ends,
they also have have those sealed air. So you could get all kinds of water on. These are
I didn't see someone in the Amazon review said, can I mount these in my pool? No, do not do that. This could take a lot of water, but I would absolutely not recommend
to put them underwater. So if you can do anything outdoors,
then this is the way you're going to want to go. The sixth thing you'll see different
among lead strips is the voltage, and you will typically see five,
12 and 24 volt options. Now, as you go up in voltage, it does not necessarily
get brighter in the specific LEDs. So five volt versus 12 volt, if you're running one LED,
they're going to be the same brightness. But the more volts you have, the more LEDs you can run at full voltage
if you think about it that way. So you might just think,
why not just use 24 volt all the time? But there are some advantages
using the lower voltage strips. I like to use the five volt strips a lot
and that's a lot of what I have here. And that's because you can run those off of an Arduino,
which has a five volt output. You can also run those off of a USB charger,
which I done in the floating shelf video because a little battery banks
like this one or five volts. And that's
what I've been powering these strips with. So you can plug that into any of your
cell phone chargers and power some of these strips
or powered off of your computer. A general rule of thumb is
you can drive about 105 volt LEDs with the standard power supply,
which is probably two amps. And with the 12 volts
you can go around up to 230 240 LEDs. And with a 24 volt, again, you can double
that again to around 462 480. When you walk past 100 LEDs on five
volts, it's not like they just shut off. You just start losing color degradation,
especially in the white. I've got a strip right here. This is a five meter strip
that has 60 LEDs per meter at five volts. And this is my favorite strip,
the 28 one to be. And I will have links
to these in the description. Now all strips are going to have
a different power draw depending upon how many LEDs you have. And the voltage to
this strip here is 90 watts and 300 LEDs. So it's like I have 300 little point
three watt light bulbs, but that's at full brightness
on all the scales. So most of the time it's going to operate
well below that. And I'm just driving these off of
a little wall plug that runs at two amps. And when I turn it on,
it actually looks great. It's running all 300 LEDs
and everything looks fine. So how does that work? And that's
because these aren't using the 4.3. Once they're only using a portion
of the channels of the red, green and blue to make the colors. And maybe they're running at a little bit
lower brightness, which in essence will allow me to double or triple
the amount of LEDs that I can drive. But when we go to white,
that's a different story. Now I've got the brightness down
and all the LEDs look very similar and an even color. But as I start turning up the brightness,
they start to fall off in color right around this 100 led mark. And if I keep going,
they really get orange at the end and then the lights start flashing,
basically saying you're trying to draw too much current
and I'm going to shut down or overheat. And that brings us to the seventh thing
that you need to know, which is choosing your power supply
or adding another one. Now, when you have more voltage,
that means you can get more wattage at the same amperage
because Watts is just volts times amps. So if you get double the voltage,
you can get double the watts, which means you can power twice
as many LEDs. So if I'm using a five volt strip,
I can't really change that up and increase the voltage
because you will burn out the LEDs. But what you can do is increase
the other part of the equation, which is the amperage. What you can do
is add more power into the strip with a second power supply
or a second wall break. So I've got my little two amp
wall charger. We got that plugged in here and
that will only drive us to about 100 LEDs. But I also have this power supply,
which is an adjustable power supply,
and it goes all the way up to 24 volts. But I'm going to crank that down
to five volts, but we're going to the power to the other end of the strip and see
if it turns that yellow into white. You can just inject power
at any of these little pieces and they even have little wires
on the end that you could attach to. But just for now, I'm going to do it
right on the pad. I put the five volt on here
and there you go. Look at that. It changes to the same color
and a nice bright white. And there's a little bit squealing that's actually from the power supply
because it's a piece of junk. So applying power into the end
or the middle of the strip they call power injection. But the other way to do it is just
to put more power at the beginning. With a larger power supply, you can get bigger power supplies
like this one right here. This is 60 amps at five volts, so that should be more than enough
to fully power this 90 watt strip. But those bigger power supplies
are typically for a large installations. I don't ever use those. I'll either use the wall outlet
and if I need some more amperage, I will upgrade to one
that's like a five AMP adapter and that will obviously give you
a lot more runtime. For me, this is always work
because I'm usually only running 3 to 4 feet at a time. Now that we have the LEDs
and the power supplies. The eighth thing to know is
how do you control these? So there are different types of controllers and they're basically
what give the instructions to the LEDs. And like everything else,
there are options. So on the easy side,
we have these inline controllers and that's
what I've been using the power these. So this is just a little receiver
and it's got instructions already programed on it for some different options
that line up with the remote and all you have to do
is put this in line with the power source and it goes out to the strip
and you can control it in the middle. You're going to have controllers
that you're going to have to wire input power to. And I have an example here, and honestly, I don't have a lot of these
because I just don't use them. I'm either on the easy end
or on the more advanced end. The nice thing about these is
you could add in things like wi fi, you could associate these
with your home assistant or that that's Google or the Amazon equivalent,
and that gives you some options to have more configurability and to use
apps and control things on your phone. And then the option that I love and also
love to hate are the microcontrollers. And these are all basically
little computers and goes from little things like this
little D one Remus mini to an Arduino Nano and SB 32
or a full sized Arduino, you know, And basically, like I said,
these are just computers that you can actually write the code
and put it on them. And so that way
you have complete control over what's happening, timings and everything,
and you can write all those scripts. If programing is not your thing, that's
okay because there is an application called W led
and basically they've done it all for you and it will connect
into your microcontroller and basically
give it all the instructions. And so you can just go up there,
you can choose different animations. They have a ton of them in there. It's what I used on my party coffee table
to get all those cool animations
and even have it react to music. If you're just getting started with LEDs, I would highly recommend
to start with the easy option and I'll have a link down below to this one, which is my favorite,
and it's inexpensive and easy to use. And then as you grow in your reality
projects, you can start trying the microcontrollers W led and even maybe
programed something yourself. So I've been showing you
these rolls of LEDs. They're five meters
or 16.4 feet for my American friends, but most of the time you're not going to use the whole roll,
probably almost all the time. So the nice thing you need to know
is how to cut the strips, how to connect them, and how to get exactly
the size that you want for your project. Every LED strip has a place
where you can cut them to size and it is where the copper is exposed
and basically that so that you could solder, connect them together. But how far apart those are spaced
depends upon the type of the LED strip. So on these five volt LED strips, these
are the individually addressable ones. There is a cut space
in between every single led. So you can go in the increments
of how far apart the ladies are. When you go up to most 12 volt LEDs,
they start being paired into groups of three LEDs in between the pads
where you can cut it. And when you go up to 24 volt,
it goes all the way up to six or eight LEDs in between the cut spots. Now, on some of the pads,
you're going to see this and this is a little solder joint
and that's just where they attach the strips
when they're in the manufacturing process because they only have so long the length
before they need to add more on. And you could do the exact same thing
when you start cutting them up and rearranging strips
and to cut the strips the length. All you need is just a regular pair of scissors
and you just go right to where that pad is and you want to cut it
just right down the middle. So now you've got these two pieces
and you have the little copper pads here that are exposed
and you can make a connection with those. Now to join two strips together, soldering is definitely
give me the best connection. This could be the best of electrical
and it's going to be the strongest. What if you don't want to solder? They have some other options for you
that make these little plastic connectors that have basically jumpers on them and you can just connect the pieces
right in there and snap them together. So if you wanted to extend a strip
or maybe you want to make a 90 degree turn or maybe you want it to join three parts
together, you could do that all with these connectors. I do prefer to solder my connections and that's
what I've done in most of my projects, because putting them together with
these is kind of a pain in the butt. Just make sure you line
everything up the correct way and the lead strips are hard to get under those pins
because they just want a crinkle. So you have to kind of
pry up the pins a little bit, but when you close it back down,
it should make a nice connection. Now that you've got all your LEDs
figured out, he's got them wired. How are you going to mount them?
Where are you going to put them? That's
the last thing you need to think about. Now. There are a lot of different options
in almost every LED strip comes with adhesive on the back
and you can just peel it and stick it on. Now, a lot of these adhesives
that you get with some of the cheaper strips,
they might just fall or right off. And even my favorite strips,
these ones from BTF lighting that I've been showing them. But if lighting
is not sponsoring this or anything, I just really have had a great experience
with their product. But they have two varieties. So what I've been showing you
is the 2012 B Eco, and this one runs on a little bit lower
wattage, but also the back is a little bit different adhesive. You see this is just this blue adhesive
and this is more of a generic, whereas on the other version
that's a little more expensive. It's the exact same thing as far
as the lights per meter and everything. It has three m tape on the back. So if you have something
that has the three M, the 200 MP or something like that, that's a pretty good adhesive
and that is going to stay in place. But if you don't have that, you're
definitely going to want to reinforce the strips as you put them up
and don't rely on the adhesive. And some of these strips will even come
with a little baggie of clips. And these are just adhesive
that you can stick up and then slide the LED right
underneath there. There's lots of other options online. If you just search for LED strip mounts. But what's probably more important is
how are you going to diffuse the light when it's mounted? So earlier
I showed you this little diffusion panel and that comes with this little aluminum
mount. Now, this aluminum channel is probably
the most popular way to put LEDs in. And you put your LED strip right inside
and then you put the diffuser on top. And that way it kind of evens out
the LEDs and looks nicer. Now they do have this channel
and different profiles. They have some that go up in corners
and there some that are deeper or wider depending
on the type of light strip you have. So just make sure you know
the width of your strip and match it up with the profile you want. Using the aluminum channel,
it helps dissipate heat as well as you have access to it
in case anything goes wrong. But there is one last style of LEDs that I want to show you
that actually have diffuser built in, and you may have seen these
in the recent floating shelf video I did. And those are F cob LEDs. That stands for Flexible Chip on board
and it has this little silicone coating over the top, but it's also made
of hundreds of tiny little LEDs. This actually has 480 LEDs per meter. If you get in real tight
there, you might be able to make them out. If you want to see my project
where I've used LEDs for some ideas, I got a playlist
cued up for you right there. A big
thank you to the FTB T Builders Club. I'm Brad and until next time,
get out there and build something awesome.
