Incompatible strip or user error?

Heya folks!

I’ve been trying to get some led strips working with wled with limited success.

I purchased these addressable led strips before I learned about wled:

In the “About” section it claims the strips are: “5050 WS2811sb 1903 WiFi LED StripLight”

I have WLED 0.14.0-b3 (build 2306210) installed on one of these:

Under the pulldown in hardware setup for the wled, I chose “WS281X” and set the gpio and led count appropriately.

What happens however is that the leds will only slightly light up and show red as I move the color picker around while in “solid” mode. I’ve got an external power supply that feeds 5V/30A and the strip I have connected is only 50 pixels.

I have some other identical esp32 devices with an identical power supply but with sk6812 strips and those work fine, and I even tested this setup with one of those strips without issue.

Any idea what I’ve done wrong? Or is this strip just not compatible? I’ve included a pic showing a section of the strip.

Additional close up pic of the chip (I tried to include this in the original post, but for whatever reason there’s a restriction for new users that limits uploads to a single pic?)
WS16703

" I’ve got an external power supply that feeds 5V/30A"
I am pretty sure that you have a 12V LED strip.

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Oh man, good catch! I just checked the power transformer that came with the leds and indeed it is 12v out. I’ll look for some kinda step up for this, ty!

I’d suggest you just find an appropriate 12V supply and a separate 5V supply for the MCU.

You could inexpensively power the MCU with a 5V wall wart power supply, and the lights with a 12V, after you tie the grounds together

Thanks y’all! I ended up re-using the 12v power supply that came with the led strips, and yes, I needed to tie the grounds to let the esp32/wled device control em properly.

So I’ve got three segments now – 2 of those 50 pixel strips that run on 12v and one of those sk6812 5v strips as the third using that different power supply.