Incompatible strip or user error?

Questions
1

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.

led-strip
led-strip1128×3021 449 KB

2

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

closeup-chip
closeup-chip770×710 92.2 KB

3

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

2 Likes
4

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!

5

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

6

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

7

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.