Those same ones, 527089. I bought 135 and I have about half left over.
Very basic config. I experimented with changing the led order, so the pattern went from outside in, or top to bottom, but the default order worked well. I made sure to use pin 2 for an esp8266. I do have some extra parts on there. A resistor and some capacitors. I wasn’t sure they were necessary, but the adafruit neopixel boards had them, so I decided they must be worth it.
This is from my order:
Looks like they are hasl, white, 1.6mm, 1oz. If you aren’t sure you are going to be able to use them, then the cheaper stuff is probably a decent bet. I work with professional electrical engineers and they almost always find mistakes in the boards right after they get them. Just like novels need editors and revisions. It might sting a little less if you bought the cheaper boards.
I did not use that. I assembled them myself. I can’t remember exactly, but I think it was about an hour per board. I went slow, and I installed the first few LEDs and ESP8266 and tested before installing all of them. I also had some rework to do, and had some soldering mistakes (it happens).
The LEDs are only 4 pins. They aren’t hard to solder yourself (or remove without an air station). But not just any soldering iron will work. You need one with temperature control and a fine point. Fine solder, extra flux, and solder suckers are also pretty useful. I’m not sure what the minimum set of gear actually is. I have accumulated a lot of bits and bobs over the years.
There are a lot of ways to go about debugging something like this. I am sure there are experts here that would know more. But I my suggestion is to isolate the issue and test some solutions.
You should be able to measure the voltage at the LEDs while they are running (careful not to short anything). If they are getting good voltage while running, then your gnd and vcc pours are fine. If the voltage is significantly smaller than the input, then yeah, you might have power problems.
The digital signal goes through them in serial. The first pixel needs a good connection to the ESP. If the first one is fine, then the problem is probably between the last good pixel and the first bad one. If you think the traces are too small, try using a separate wire to jumper across one of them. You can use your multimeter in “beeper mode” to make sure all the pixels have solid connections to gnd, vcc, and all of the do/di connections are good (do this with the board unplugged). Measure at the LEDs, not on an adjacent trace. The LED to LED should measure the soldering, the traces, etc. I had a cold solder joint on one of my LEDs and it would work sometimes, and then be noisy at other times. All the later pixels were either off, frozen, or noisy, depending on where I pushed that LED. I resoldered it and it was fine.
I also have Vcc/Gnd/Di/Do pins broken out. Two of my boards don’t have an esp. That helped me when trying to test everything. I was able to use an external esp to check that everything was working. I trust wled a lot, and I wouldn’t use any other software until I had it working. It is a known stable quantity. I am using 0.13.1.