The simplest way to hook up your Dotstars!   

Get out the male connector you cut from the end of your Dotstars.

Strip about 1/8" of shielding from each wire.  With your soldering iron, neatly and delicately "tin" each wire with just a tiny amount of solder.  This will keep the wires from getting frayed and fuzzy and make it a little easier to fit them into the Pro Trinket's holes.

Find the 5v and G holes at the end of the Pro Trinket opposite the USB port.  Solder the red wire into 5v and the black wire into G. 

Then, solder the green wire into hole 10, and the yellow wire into hole 9.

It's a bit of a tight fit, and you may need to reduce the tin solder or trim the wires a bit, but they will fit (so don't give up).

Plug the connector into your Dotstar strip, and a USB cable into your Pro Trinket, and be sure the strand lights up with fiery light!  

If you're happy powering from a USB battery or wall charger, you're done!  Go build your fire.

If you want to be able to run the fire from a AAA battery pack or LiPoly battery, there's one more step. 

Take some solder and tin the two pads on the back of your Pro Trinket, and carefully solder on a male JST connector.

Now you can plug in a battery of your choice.  

If you encounter trouble…

Any time you hit a roadblock with a DotStar project, we’ll usually ask that you start with the “strandtest” example from our own Adafruit_DotStar library. This helps us narrow down whether it’s a hardware or software issue. The library is installed similarly to FastLED or any other — unzip, rename “Adafruit_DotStar” and place in your Arduino/Libraries folder, then restart the Arduino IDE. You’ll find the strandtest example under File→Sketchbook→Libraries→Adafruit_DotStar→strandtest

If strandtest fails to run, this suggests a hardware issue…for example, connecting to the wrong Pro Trinket pin.

If you’re new to Arduino programming and LEDs, we usually suggest starting with the Adafruit_DotStar library…it’s pretty basic, the strip declaration is more conventional, and we can stay on top of keeping it compatible with our own products and the most mainstream Arduino boards.

As FastLED is a more “bleeding edge” third-party library, we can’t always guarantee compatibility across versions or with specific boards. You can find help through their community on Google+. This is potent stuff, written by people with a deep appreciation for LED art, and we wanted to showcase it.