Plug the male end of the power switch into your Feather's JST port.
Cut the female JST connector off the other side of the switch. Strip some shielding from the wires and screw them securely into your screw terminal, red to + and black to -.
Strip around 1/2" of the insulation off each wire and fold the bare wires over onto themselves before stuffing them into the screw holes, just to give the hardware a little more to grab.
Cut the wires going to the male JST connector (currently plugged into the Feather).
Solder the middle wire from the JST connector (green, in my case) into pin 12 on your Feather. This is the data wire.
Twist the wires you just cut back together, and splice them to your 3-pin JST connector's red and black wires. These will feed power to the Feather and to the lights.
Solder the red wires to the leftmost wire (red) and the black wires to the rightmost wire (white on this connector).
A Word about Connectors
These little locking JST connectors are very handy and they're everywhere in DIY electronics projects. They come soldered to the ends of LED strips and many of us eventually end up with a drawer full of these, salvaged from various projects.
However, there seems to be no industry standard for color-coding. Sometimes you'll find a connector where the red wire is on the left, and sometimes it's on the right. This can be really problematic. When you're knee-deep in a project and trying to keep diagrams straight in your head, it's VERY easy to just roll with whatever color code schema is in front of you. But just because the wire is red on your connector does not mean it's going to neatly line up with the power wires in your project.
Do not use the wire colors to determine what wires to connect to each other. There isn't a standard for the color of wires on NeoPixel and JST connectors. Please follow the wiring guide on what wires to connect.
Note how this connector I'm using has the red wire on the left, and the connector that comes with this LED strip has the red wire on the right. Hooking this up will cause a short circuit, because power and ground will be reversed. This is a great way to damage the electronics, so always double check your wiring and don't depend on color coding!
Solder the female end of the 3-pin JST connector to the IN end of the NeoPixel strip. Look for arrows on the strip and make sure they're pointing AWAY from the end you're soldering to. These strips are directional and soldering the data wire to the opposite end will not work.
For surrounding a coffin-shaped opening I want at least one "corner" bend for my lights. These lights are bendy up and down but not left to right. To make a flexible corner, cut the lights in the center of the copper pads and solder a little piece of silicone stranded ribbon cable (or any 3 short, flexible wires) to each side. Make sure to match up the wires so the pads are reconnected in the same order as before they were cut.
Cover the connections with your clear heat shrink and fill them up with hot glue before shrinking, to outdoor-proof and robustify your strips.
I used 30 lights, then made a "corner" and added another 30 lights. This uses up 1m perfectly and will line 3 sides of the hole in the coffin.
I then added an 8" piece of ribbon wire to the end of the second section of lights. This will allow the strip to pass around the edge of the mirror so to continue the lights on the back side of the illusion.
I added another 30 lights, a corner, and 30 more lights for the back side of the mirror, using 120 lights (2 m) total.
If you've already installed the software, it's time for testing. Plug your lights in using your 5v power supply and click the switch, if needed.
The lights should come on in solid yellow. Hooray!
Troubleshooting
If your lights didn't come on, here are a few things to try:
- Flip your on/off switch. Was it just turned off?
- Head back to WLED and check your pinout configuration under LED Preferences. Be sure your data wire is connected to pin 12 and that you've told WLED it's on 12.
- Check your wiring! Be sure you soldered to the IN end of the LED strip. If the arrows on the strip are pointing toward your solder joints, you've got the wrong end -- they should be pointing away.
- Try re-uploading the WLED software.
- Make sure you're on the correct WiFi network - if you're on a different network you won't see the WLED connection.
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