led diode on led strip

[CoinDuckling369]

hello LTT users

i have an question,

can u add some rgb led diode's on an led strip

(see pictures)

connect diode to the led strip

[Mira Yurizaki]

Yes, as long as you know where the appropriate pins hook up to.

[TAHIRMIA]

Yes but it is very hard to 

[Windows7ge]

The LED strip you are displaying looks surface mount not through hole which means you'd be bending pins to surface mount them and it may not come out pretty. Also you'll need to check if theirs pads available on the strip for each color/common. If the strip only has 2 pads per led then 4-pin RGB won't work.

[mackncheesiest]

I've never actually dissected a strip like that, but I believe those LED strips don't work in a purely analog way. I think I've seen somewhere that they are initialized by essentially shifting in a stream of bits into registers that specify the intensity of the R, G, and B components of each LED, which could honestly be accomplished with a single wire. Add a second for whatever the operational voltage is and a third for ground (maybe a fourth for a clock depending on registers vs latches), and it could actually be somewhat difficult to extend them. You'd need to add some extra components to deal with that if it is the case. This is all under the assumption that the strip does, in fact, work like this, though, which could be entirely wrong.

 

So, tl;dr: Maybe you can, but even if it's possible, it won't look nice. If you want it to look nice, I would just recommend buying more strips/a longer LED strip.

 

Edit: Two popular varieties on Adafruit, the NeoPixel and the DotStar, both work essentially like this, with the NeoPixel using what appears to be some sorta-kinda-SPI-protocol and the DotStar using pure Master-only SPI to shift 8-bit color data for the RGB values along the strip. If you have a DotStar, then to be fully compliant with the strip, each LED actually has its own embedded microcontroller, and as a result, a trivial extension of this would require an individual microcontroller for every LED you add. Now you could theoretically control multiple SPI connections from a single Arudino, but that might be tricky. The good news, though, is that it looks like each LED strip is actually fairly easy to extend by just buying more and hooking them together.

[johnny5c]

If your strip is a smart strip (individually addressable LEDs) like the one in your picture it won't work because the strip uses a microcontroller and not voltage control like the LED you posted.

[CoinDuckling369]

And what if I use an normal led strip?

[mackncheesiest]

What specific LED strip are you using? Do you have a link or anything?

 

If it's something like this, it doesn't look to be very possible, because the way they implement it is a little bit backwards. They have one 9-12V rail for power, and the remaining 3 R, G, and B wires allow you to dim the LEDs by raising the voltage on each of the R, G, and B wires. It looks like they reduce the gap between the ceiling and the ground not by lowering the ceiling (the power supply) but by raising the ground.

 

Your RGB LEDs, on the other hand, have a common ground and you control the level of the R, G, and B components in the opposite way, by lowering the ceiling and keeping the ground constant. You could, though, buy more strips and wire them together like they show here.