Interesting... I'll keep that in mind in the future. In any case, I've rearranged things as shown in the new diagram attached here, all wires are just ~5-12 cm, and I switched to USB power from my computer, and still nothing. Arduino is fine, multimeter reads as expected on everything, even disabled those serial debugging things in case that was messing something up, but still not a single light from the strip.
There is... a SLIGHT possibility I've fried the thing already... I got a bit ahead of myself when I first got it and connected the battery supply with NO capacitor for a few seconds to see if anything would happen (which it didn't). Stupid careless move on my part. Do you think it didn't survive? Or that it may have came defective if everything looks good here?
