Strip leds at 5v

Intro:
Are you looking to implement some leds on your project? Do you want a strip leds that works at 5v? Are you interest about strip leds? I hope that one of these questions you have answered to YES otherwise this post will be useless for you =).

I am going to describe what I got on Amazon for a few pounds, just to add on my project some strip leds that could work at 5V instead 12v as usual.


Items:

• Strip leds
• Arduino
• Jumpers

Teardown:

The strip leds came with a small controller with 3 functions:

• Light: you can change the colour of the leds with predefined colours
• Speed/Bright: you can change the speed and brightness
• Mode: you can change mode between: fading, strobe and solid

In the video you can see how bright they are and a small demo.

 

Under the protective plastic you can find 3 buttons and on the back some components, nothing very interesting, the main chip doesn't have any info printed on it.

The strip leds is a normal RGB, you can see from the image below, it has 4 pins:

• 5V
• Green
• Red
• Blue

Great news that allows me to re-use this strip leds with my Arduino.

Testing leds: Google plus ( sorry I couldnt upload on youtube)

Arduino Test:

The final conclusion, this simple and "cheap" ( well still 4 pounds but for prototyping is good enough ),  is suitable to be connected on your Arduino.

Below you can see that I tried to give 5v and the Ground to the pin Blue, I got the blue colour.

What you need to do is to connect the 3 pins on your 3 PWM output and try to send values from 0 to 255.

The strip leds will change colour based on what you are going to send on each pins, it's easy, isn't it?