I built this cute little board with 16 LED strips arranged in a star to use as a test bed for my upcoming projects. In doing so, I made a couple of mistakes and learned the hard way how to drive these very finicky strips.
I figured that all 16 strips could just share a ground. Why not? Ground is ground, right? It’s shared everywhere. So I build a little copper ring as the ground and routed that back to the Teensy controller, and used ribbon cable for all the signals.
Guess what? It didn’t work at all. There was a ton of interference between the data wires and the lights flashed like crazy.
Here’s what I learned:
- You have to use twisted pair GND+Signal, from each and every LED strip, all the way back to the controller. 24AWG CAT6 cable is nice for this. You can’t share the grounds like a bolshevik. It won’t work.
- I had been using 3.3v signals since that’s what the Teensy 3.2 puts out. I know, everyone said you have to use level shifters, but I had looked closely at the data sheets and it seemed to me like modern WS2815s are willing to take 3.3 volts. Well, they are, but you can’t transmit very far. Please put back the level shifters and run at 5 volts.
- And finally, I kept seeing this weird claim that you need to put a little 100 ohm resistor before the first LED. Was it to “protect” the LEDs? Or “match impedence”? Or prevent “reflections“? Who knows. I didn’t really get it either and it seemed to work without out. You know what? Put the damn resistor in there. I mean, it’s one resistor, Michael. What could it cost? Ten dollars?
So yeah. Level shift to 5v, signal+GND, resistors. Here’s what it looks like now:
