Individually addressable 5V LED strip - questions

Other Hardware General Electronics
1

Hello
I was a little spontaneous and found I had a Individually addressable 5V LED strip laying around, the problem being I cannot seem to figure out how it should be wired.
Here are some pictures of it, could anyone give me any advice on how to wire it up correctly, so I do not fry it.

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So far I would think that the direction is indicated with the arrows, so start wiring from the direction of -> so connect the black and red from the underside of the the LED strip to respectively ground and 5v (external power supply capable of delivering enough amps) and the 3 pin connector to respectively arduino pin 9, pin 10, pin 11 (no transistors), am I completely wrong here?
Thank you.

2

joachimpetersen:
and the 3 pin connector to respectively Arduino pin 9, pin 10, pin 11 (no transistors), am I completely wrong here?

Well you certainly are - completely wrong - on that part! :astonished:

I do believe you have correctly identified the input end - the one on the left of your picture from which the arrows point away.

And as the listing page specifies the total load at eight Amps, I suggest you connect your 5V 8A power supply to both ends with the red (positive) and black (negative) flying wires. So if you lay the cable out straight, you should run an auxiliary power wire from one end to the other using fairly decent gauge wire. Otherwise you will get the funny effect of the pixels at the non-powered end not only being slightly dimmer than the powered end at high overall brightness levels, but the colour being different (due to the different threshold voltages of the different colours).

OK. Now these are single-wire interface strings. You connect your Arduino ground to the white wire (which is apparently also connected to the black, negative power wire) on the JST connector (at the input end) and the appropriate Arduino output pin to the single green data wire. The instructions including which output pin and the library are available from Adafruit.

If your power supply is properly regulated, you can use it to power the Arduino also via the 5V pin.

3

I do not have any capacitor of the sized required so I am going to leave it out

I would advise against that. It is not just a matter of voltage regulation, it is a matter of lowering the impedance of the power supply.

Sorry but the picture is so blurred and so zoomed out that you can't see what wire goes where.