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Re:Building DIY LED strips for fun by solarkraft on Sunday July 19, 2020 @08:59AM (#23889027)
This is a nice, interesting, useful article, but the title is garbage.

Step 1: Buy some WS2812B strips.

You're not building the strips. You're building the control infrastructure.

Re:Building DIY LED strips for fun by KirinDave on Sunday July 19, 2020 @02:23PM (#23891268)
I believe the word you're searching for here is "clickbait."

Controlling LED strips is not a boring project and it's a wonderful entry into the hobby since it often works with very safe voltages and is happy with cheap components.

But this article is clickbait, and it's probably the most detail-free article imaginable on the subject.

Re:Building DIY LED strips for fun by xxs on Sunday July 19, 2020 @05:15PM (#23892500)
> works with very safe voltage

True for constant voltage, resistor limited current ones only. With constant current LED drivers, the voltage is approx 3V per LED. So it adds nicely to unsafe levels, albeit DC.

Another note is the power supplies can be quite unsafe too - esp. the cheap off-brand ones.

Re:Building DIY LED strips for fun by KirinDave on Sunday July 19, 2020 @06:02PM (#23892812)
Panels and strips using more than 24V are extremely rare, with 12V being common and 5V existing for the hobbyist crowd. I've never seen a 24V rig for hobbyist uses (although some Ikea strips run there).

You don't wire them in serial anyways. In general if you care about blocks of LEDs at all you don't wire them in serial.

Re:Building DIY LED strips for fun by oneplane on Sunday July 19, 2020 @05:36PM (#23892645)
For some reason I also thought this was about making the strips for fun. But this has nothing to do with making, it's just assembling someone else's strips...

I was just curious to see how one would go about making strips. Order a bunch of wires and hand solder some SMD LEDs? Get a FFC made by a random PCB manufacturer and solder LEDs on those? Make some sort of mould and use one of those odd silver glue connections to an existing wire strip? Order a bare strip and use solder paste and a heat gun or hot air soldering station to solder them on and then dip the whole strip in transparent elastic resin?

Instead of having some curiosity itch scratched it just makes it worse.

Re:Building DIY LED strips for fun by Turing_Machine on Sunday July 19, 2020 @12:16PM (#23890325)
Agreed. Somewhat interesting article, terrible title.

Something like "Custom Lighting With Controllable LED Strips" would be better.

Re:Building DIY LED strips for fun by matthaughey on Sunday July 19, 2020 @01:12PM (#23890749)
I get that you both thought maybe I was soldering my own strips raw but the DIY in the title is about setting up your own strips, not just buying a bunch of LIFX or Hue strips.
Re:Building DIY LED strips for fun by fock on Sunday July 19, 2020 @05:42PM (#23892693)
which is "building WITH LED strips". I once "built" a LED-matrix display from strips, because it was a demo project and money for HW was scarce (and time to short to look into fabrication for a non-EE-person; also brightness maxes out at 1000cd/m² last I checked) - I seriously came there for some info how you created your own, cheap DIY high-density setup for the WS-LEDs (cooling becomes also a problem eventually for high brightness, so I was looking forward to a solution to this problem). Instead I got the blog equivalent of a YT-video: how to decorate your room in 5 easy steps.

BTW: You actually did do nothing more than buying a bunch of strips, I don't see a big technical difference between hue and chinese strips + a chinese hue-bridge except for the soldering (but afaik they also offer connectors for solderless application...). So you might change the title to: "setting up a chineses hue replacement for cheap with soldering" (though I would expect pictures of your soldering then...

Re:Building DIY LED strips for fun by matthaughey on Sunday July 19, 2020 @07:26PM (#23893290)
This article isn't for you. It was written for people that have never soldered in their lives or built anything from parts.
Re:Building DIY LED strips for fun by SK6812away on Sunday July 19, 2020 @10:51PM (#23894256)
Hey, keep it up. I'd be very embarrassed if any of my blog posts ended up on HN, too.

You'll get there! :)