Ok, I'm getting things ready to wire up my led strips and I just

Archive FastLED Archive
1

Ok, I’m getting things ready to wire up my led strips and I just want to get confirmation that I’ve got things set up correctly so I don’t have to redo a bunch of work. Here’s what I’ve got:

I have 7, 1 meter long led strips with 60 WS2812 leds each.

I have a PSU that is 5v/30Amp to power my strips & arduino board. I am not running anything at full brightness so I should have plenty of overhead from the PSU.

Each led strip has wires coming off of each end for power, data, ground. They are hooked up as one long chain. My plan is to wire a 5.5mm connector to each strip with a 1000uF/6.3 volt capacitor to steady out the power. I will be sending power to each strip individually. And then each of those connectors will hook up to the PSU through a splitter I found for the 5.5mm connectors.

The splitter has 8 connectors on it so I have 1 extra I can use for the arduino board.

My questions:

  1. Do I need a capacitor between the PSU and the arduino?
  2. Do I need to connect the arduino ground to the ground for the strips or is it fine because they are all running from the same PSU?
  3. If I don’t need to pass the ground through then I should only need to have 1 wire connecting each strip(data) correct?
  4. Am I missing anything?

I can post photos if they are needed.

Thank you so much for your help!

2

Sounds like you are on the right track.

  1. No.
  2. No, since everything is using the same power supply.
  3. As it sounds like you have everything hooked to a common ground you shouldn’t need to have a ground running between every strip. Yes, just Data will go strip to strip.
  4. You might want to use 1000uF 16V capacitors instead of 6.3V.
3

@marmil what would the advantage of using the higher voltage be? I’m not familiar with how that would change things.

Thanks!

4

It will give you a larger safety margin. They’re a tiny bit larger in physical size but cost is negligible so in my mind just get the larger size of you can.

Here’s a post with some good info.

5

@marmil that’s very helpful, thanks for all the feedback!