WS2812B LED Strip behaving wildly

I was able to get through the setup on this to be able to control my WS2812B LED strip (300 pixels) with my NodeMCU v3 ESP8266 the setup went fine and I was able to discover the Light strip just fine however whenever I turned it on it seems no matter what setting I have it at the light always go haywire like this however whenever I change a setting like when I change the color of the light it pulses really fast with the random colors for maybe 50-100ms then goes back to doing what it does in the video, it also stops this behavior completely when I disconnect the data pin of the light strip from the D4 pin of the ESP8266 and the light strip retains the last state. I don’t know what I’m doing wrong so if someone could help me that would be great! Thank you for your time

How do you have it wired? It looks like you don’t have common ground between the controller, strip and power supply.

im trying to have a common ground however when i unplug the ESP board from my PC it seems to loose all data so I’m not sure how I could do that because the power for my light strip is connected to an outlet (I’m trying things rn but I think I was wrong in this statement)

okay it was definitely a grounding issue thank you so much <3

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It would be best if you could make a diagram of how you have it wired. You have to power the Esp either from it’s usb port or from it’s VCC pin and ground pin.

If powering the Esp from the usb port you need to connect your data pin and a ground pin to your lights and + and - from your LED’s power supply to the LEDs

If powering the Esp from it’s VCC pin and ground pin and also powering your LEDs from the same (5v) power supply you would connect VCC to your positive of the power supply and the LEDs positive to the supply. The ground pin to the negative of the power supply and your LEDs negative to the power supply, and your data pin to the LEDs data.

https://kno.wled.ge/basics/getting-started/