Gone are the days that you have to worry about silicone water proofing splitting and breaking on you! These are sealed non-addressable 5 meter long RGB LED strips that come packed with 60 5060 LEDs per meter. Each of these strips need a 12V supply and are enclosed by a flexible silicon jacket with an IP65 waterproof rating to protect your precious 5060 LEDs. You will be able to control the whole LED RGB Strip together giving you cool lighting effects for your car, fish tank, or perhaps under cabinet lighting in your kitchen!
Note: These come in 5m segments on a reel. They are preterminated with wires, as shown in the pictures.
The closest Fritzing part related to this LED strip can be found here:
If you are looking at the details, the LED is flipped and IC is the 5060 package.
Apply +12V to the + pin and ground any of the colored wires to turn the LED color on. When using with a microcontroller, you would need an n-channel mosfet https://www.sparkfun.com/products/10213 to turn it on and off. The LED strips require a lot of power (especially the 5M strips) but worked well with a variable power supply set at 12V/1A. The LED strip does get warm to the touch when using.
If a board needs code or communicates somehow, you're going to need to know how to program or interface with it. The programming skill is all about communication and code.
Skill Level: Rookie - You will need a better fundamental understand of what code is, and how it works. You will be using beginner-level software and development tools like Arduino. You will be dealing directly with code, but numerous examples and libraries are available. Sensors or shields will communicate with serial or TTL.
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If it requires power, you need to know how much, what all the pins do, and how to hook it up. You may need to reference datasheets, schematics, and know the ins and outs of electronics.
Skill Level: Competent - You will be required to reference a datasheet or schematic to know how to use a component. Your knowledge of a datasheet will only require basic features like power requirements, pinouts, or communications type. Also, you may need a power supply that?s greater than 12V or more than 1A worth of current.
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it has decent ambiance, but the light doesn't penetrate anywhere even with maximum rated power applied.
Since Sparkfun has provided very little information about this light strip, I did some investigating of my own. I believe the circuit is identical to this one shown on Adafruit except that it has a 150-ohm resistor instead of a 130-ohm one for the blue and green LEDs: http://learn.adafruit.com/rgb-led-strips/schematic
On paper, giving the strip 12V and grounding the other three pins should result in a current of 20mA through each red LED and 18mA through each blue and green LED, totaling 56mA per group of 3 RGB LEDs. Since there are 20 groups of 3 RGB LEDs per meter, the current should be 1.12A per meter and 5.6A per 5-meter strip.
I tested a small strip to see if my numbers were close. I put 12V on a strip that was 6 groups long, and it drew 300mA, which comes out to 50mA per group (11% less than expected).
Summary:
expected current @12V = 56 mA/group, 1.12 A/m, 5.6 A/strip
measured current @12V = 50 mA/group, 1.00 A/m, 5.0 A/strip
You just need to apply +12V to the + pin and ground any of the colored wires to turn the LED color on. If you want use it with a microcontroller, you would need an n-channel mosfet https://www.sparkfun.com/products/10213 to turn it on and off. The LED strips require a lot of power (especially the 5M strips) but it worked good with my variable power supply set s 12V/1A. The LED strip does get warm to the touch when using.
Does this strips come with 3M adhesive tape? Do you have any ideas of how to stick this strips to a surface?
Thanks!
Yes, it comes with 3m adhesive tape.
I bought 2 of these in 5m length. I tested them with a large lead acid battery producing 12.65V. I found the following
When individually connected the draw was the following Red: 1.6 Amps Green: 1.4 Amps Blue: 1.34 Amps
When all were connected White: 3.4 Amps. (Voltage on battery dropped to 12.4V when lit.
Not sure why there is a discrepancy, this is empirical data.
Hope this helps
What would be a good power supply to use with these? I assume that the requirements for current will be significant, and not just any power supply will make the cut.
I'm powering similar strips using old VGA monitor power supplies (12V, 8A),with some extra power lines to points at the middle and end of the strip to deal with the losses along the length of the strip.
Note that this only applies to these 'dumb' LED strips. The addressable ones tend to require slightly more beefy power supplies while running off of 5V - a computer PSU might be a good match there.