Has anyone by chance been able to reverse engineer FVT deck lights? They claim to be using WS2812B chips for the lights. But it is also using 12v to power them which is interesting. I am hoping to connect a DIGIQUAD to it and run WLED to control the lights. I am waiting for the Digiquad to show up but I soldered together my own board. And am unsuccessful in getting stable responses from controlling the lights. Even with a logic shifter. Any help is appreciated as I already installed them in my new deck lol.
how did you wire them?
Hi Jinx, I wired from port D4 of an esp mini to the data in of the LED. I have also tried it with numerous sized resistors. I put a diode on the data line because for some weird reason I am getting 12v on the data line from the LED. I’m not sure why but all the light pods do it. I have also tried a logic level conversion from 3.3v to 5. The lights change colors when changing colors from the WLED app. But it’s not the correct color and very glitchy. Here’s a pic as well from the board that came with the lights.
How far from the first light is the controller?
How are you powering the lights?
Do you have common ground between the Esp, LEDs and Power supply?
Did you try changing the ‘Color Order’ in LED Preferences?
What level shifter did you try?
You can’t accurately measure data with a multimeter you need an oscilloscope for that. 
Common Ground: Yes
Wire distance: 6 inches
Power supply: I have a variable power supply. I have it set to 12v and the esp is on a buck converter reducing it down to 5. The lights them selves will not light up below 7v.
LED Settings: I’ve tried all of them but GRB seems to work the best.
Attached is a pic of the level shifters.
Your setup sounds reasonable, aside from the level shifter.
Generally I2C shifters are too slow for addressable LEDs and are not recommended. You would be better off switching to an SN74xx shifter like the SN74AHCT125N as listed in the KB Other Hardware - WLED Project.
I would also give a 33 Ohm resistor a try.
Well I got it figured out. Couple issues. The Red and Black wires from the LED pods are reverse polarity. So red is - on the lights. And they are in fact 5v. So the LEDS must have blown from 12v and that is what was causing erratic behavior. I took a new LED pod and tried it at 5v with data direct to the esp board and it worked perfect. Other than I haven’t been able to get them to turn white. All other colors I can but not white. So I will have to replace all of them and see what might be causing them to not turn white. I feel like that’s a matter of software and logic changes.
Glad you got it figured out.
" Dynamic RGB Addressable – Each dream color deck light Built-in SMD5050 LED and WS2812B"
Those do not have a white LED channel. The only way to get white(ish) is to light all three colors RGB = white(ish).
So if you select white in the color pallet you would be lighting RGB and getting some form of white.
If you go into config, user interface and turn on the RGB sliders you may or may not be able to tweak the RGB color mix to get a somewhat more desirable white.
Actually they do offer ones with a white channel. If you are wanting that make sure you source ones listed as RGBW like these:
Not 100% sure those can be individually addressed though. They do not say so, and review pix all show them all being the same color.