I've been trying to make my LED strip work but with no success. It is a 5 meter WS2812B RGB LED strip (60 LED's per meter).
I did some research and it turns out that one LED draws around 60mA at full brightness, so the entire strip would take around 18A at full brightness. I use an old PSU from my computer which is capable of delivering 20A at 5V. The controller for the strip is an Arduino Uno. Below is the circuit I have:
The problem is, when I execute a program that sets all LED's to WHITE, the further away from the start of the strip, the leds become yellow and red at the end. If I set them all to WHITE but at less brightness, the first 20-30 LED's glow white while others just blink random colors. Same thing happens with any other script, for example the rainbow fade works on first few LED's while others flash random colors.
Now I suspect that's due to the voltage drop, I measured the voltage at the end of the strip (~5V) and at the end it was only around 3.5V.
My question is, how do I inject voltage into the strip without making the design look like overhead power lines? Do I need to inject the data line too?
I bough a 2.5mm^2 wire but it looks too overkill, can I use something a lot thinner to use the strip as an actual flexible strip?