A whole lotta wire …
Determine where you'd like to place the Feather + Pulse Sensor in your room and then decide where you to place the LED driver boards + LED strips. I placed the Feather near the middle of the room on a coffee table and the driver boards on opposite walls – so I needed a lot of wire to connect the Feather to each driver (~20ft to allow for routing around furniture/etc).
Each board needs 2 connections - one for PWM signal, and one for ground. 2-conductor cable, such as a thin coaxial type, would be ideal for this situation. I had 26AWG stranded wire on hand, so that's what's used in this guide.
Figure out the length you'll need, then cut two matching lengths of different colored wire (I used black for ground & yellow for PWM)
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Strip about 1/4 inch of insulation off the ends of each wire, then tin the tips with solder. |
Optionally, to keep the wires from getting too unruly, you can twist the pairs together and bind them at regular intervals with tape or heat shrink tubing …
Extend the LED Strip Wires
The wires coming off the LED strips aren't very long, so you'll likely need to solder extensions to them. Since we're only using the red channel, we only need to extend the red & black wires.
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The color coding on the strip's wires is a bit confusing. The red wire is a ground/negative connection for the red channel and the black wire is the positive/12V connection for the whole strip. Because these colors were the opposite of conventional designation, I swapped them when extending. Hopefully, this does not make things even more confusing for those following along. |
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Cut two pieces of stranded wire for the extensions - ~4ft worked for me. Strip and solder the tips. |
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Solder the extensions to the LED strip's wires and seal the connections with heat shrink tubing or electrical tape. |
The tail end of the LED strip also has wire leads for chaining strips (an option I did not explore). To avoid shorts, wrap the red and black wires on that end with a couple layers of electrical tape …
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