5050 led strip 60 led/m flickers when fading in and out of colors

Question

I have to start out by saying I know just about nothing with electronics and it's very hard for my mind to get a grip on but I'll try my best.

I bought a 5m long 5050 led strip with 60 leds per meter. They are RGB leds. These are the leds:

This is the picture of what it came in:

The transformer link is here.

The infrared receiver looks like this:

The way it's set up is led strip to receiver to transformer to wall. Things are plugged into the transformer as shown. The white wire is for the receiver and the black goes to the wall:

But when I put it in fade mode (slowly fades between colors) it flickers transitioning from yellow to red to purple. Blue and green are fine and smooth. And the other mode (red fade in then out, then green fade in then out, then blue in and out) the red is ok but the green and blue flicker a lot. Is this set up wrong and what can I do to fix it? There is no flicker on one single color but I got it for the fading in between colors. These parts all came separate but from the same store. The employees helped choose it all out but I can't ask them questions because I'm an American in Russia with horrible Russian.

Answer 1

The LED Driver/IR Receiver uses Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) to set the brightness of the individual colors. PWM works by quickly turning on and off the Power to the individual color channels with a duty cycle of \$R=\frac{T_{on}}{T_{total}}\$, where \$T_{period}\$ is the period of the turning on-and-off.

For example: A duty cycle of \$50\%\$ means that the LEDs are on \$50\%\$ of the time, a duty cycle of \$20\%\$ means that they're on \$20\%\$ of the time.

Usually the value for \$T_{period}\$ should be picked to be as low as possible to prevent visible flickering, especially when the LED is moving across your field of vision. When \$T_{period}\$ is too long, flickering will be visible, especially at lower duty cycles which occur when a color if fading out.

On very cheap controllers the electronics aren't capable of a short \$T_{period}\$, and the only way to fix it is to replace the controller with a better one.