Measure out your LED strips and cut them to length. You only need enough lights to edge-light your messages, not necessarily to cover the whole mirror edge.
Solder the female end of your JST connector to the 3 attached wires. This is the IN end of this strip.
You could skip using the connectors and stick the wires from the LEDs directly into the screw terminal ports, but I definitely recommend using connectors since these LEDs are so delicate, and this project is complicated enough that you may want easy access to the microcontroller for testing.
Plug your male JST connectors into the female connectors to confirm which wire is which. Some connectors are color coded differently than others, so it's good practice to always plug them in to check the correct orientation before you do your wiring.
Once you've confirmed which wire is + and which is G (the center wire is nearly always the data wire), connect the wires to the screw terminal at ports 21 and 22.
Connect the included data cable to the PIR sensor, matching up the red wire with +5v. Use the remaining screw terminal connections for the red and black wires, and solder the yellow wire to pin 18 as shown.
The screw terminal GPIO ports are output-only, so if you connect the PIR sensor there it won't work.
Plug in your Sparkle Motion board. A test / rainbow sequence will appear on your light strands if you've got everything wired up correctly.
Troubleshooting
If your light strands don't come on, here are a few things to try:
- Check to be sure your connectors aren't cross-wired due to mismatched color coding.
- Be sure you've soldered to the IN end of the strip. Look for the tiny arrow: this is the direction of data flow. The strips don't work if you solder to the OUT end.
- If your ultra-skinny strip is coiled up, try straightening it out. These strips are unshielded and can short easily.
- Check your connectors' connection to the screw terminals. These connectors have skinny wires inside that can break easily, and the connector wires will snap off if they're wiggled around too much.
- Head to the Install WLED page and work through getting the software installed. If you've installed anything else on the board, it may no longer have the test code loaded.
Look closely at your PIR sensor and find the jumper -- a plastic piece that connects two pins in one corner. Make sure it's in position 2 (as shown) rather than position 1. Position 1 is "single trigger" mode, and position 2 sets it to re-trigger again and again.
There are two small orange screws on the side of your sensor. For now, twist them both all the way to the left. One screw determines the amount of time that passes before the sensor resets, and the other controls the distance / sensitivity. Later on you can adjust these slightly to improve your sensor's performance.
Page last edited September 30, 2025
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