I wanted to play around with some of these addressable LED strips, so I bought one off Amazon. It's a string of 300 LEDs, comes in a big spool:
The spool has the same connectors on both ends, a 3-prong that has power and control, and a 2-wire power:
I also got their controller - the SP501E. It seemed like it was relatively popular, and figured I would play with it for a while and then get an Arduino or Raspberry PI and do my own thing:
The controller said it accepted 5-24V so I found a 12V adapter in the basement that had a plug of the right size. I plugged it into the controller, plugged the controller into the LED strip using the 3-pin connector (leaving the bare wires dangling) and ... the LEDs lit up, not very enthusiastically and only about 1/3 of the way down the spool. And although the minimal instructions said "Pressing and hold the button on the controller untill the LED flashes in white", I sat there holding that *!&% button for a couple of minutes and never got the white flashing.
These sounded like they could all by symptoms of insufficient power, so I decided to get a beefier power supply. The package said 18 W/m, and the spool is 5m long, and it's running at 5V, that sounded like 18A to me. I ended up ordering the Alitove 5V 60A Power Supply which is probably a little scanty if I end up with 3 strings of lights. Who knows.
In any case, it comes with really no instructions, luckily they did include a picture on the web site of the connections:
So back to the basement I go. I found an old power cord I could snip the end off and wire into the PSU, and sure enough I got a nice 5V out between +V and -V:
There's a variable resistor to control the output, so I'm sure I could tweak it down to exactly 5.0V.
But now I ran a question due to lack of documentation. As I mentioned before, The LED spool has 2 connections - a 3-pin and 2-wires - and the controller plugs into the 3-pin, which leaves me with the 2 wires sticking out from the LED spool and the power connector for the controller. I'm not really sure what I need to do here.
So I performed surgery on my 12V power adapter, cutting off the power block itself, just leaving the wire and the plug. I then wired it into my 5V power supply, with ground on the outside of the plug:
So now I've got the same 5V supply feeding the LED strip directly, and the controller via its power jack.
That all seemed reasonable - a good amount of amperage available on my 5V supply, same 5V running into controller and LED spool, ready for liftoff.
The first time I try this, a few LEDs on the spool shine green - a nice solid color, power looks good - but holding the button on the controller does nothing.
The next time I try this, the LED spool ignores me completely. Totally dark. I am still getting 5V from the PSU.
Where did I go wrong?
