Neopixel strip acting strange when hot

Hello,

I'm going to put my neck on the block here and suggest that the 1000uF on the output of your buck converter is certainly a big capacitor and would probably power the neopixel strips (especially as you're only sing quite short ones) for a second of so after the power is turned off.

What's inside your buck converter? Could you get away with using something simpler like a Voltage regulator? A 7805 would do the job - I'm using one to power a speedo signal generator in a van, so it's happily bringing approx. 14V down to 5V - you might not need such a big smoothing capacitor (or any capacitor), then.

What's the job(s) of the 220uF's across the neopixel strips? I've built a few projects with noepixel strips (I built a light-up tube for a pedal-powered generator to show how much electricity people were generating at a science fair - that had 150 pixels in it) and have never put capacitors across the supply.

I've had neopixels light up the wrong colour or light up unexpectedly, but it's always been a bad earth or dodgy code for me...