We love some good LED blinking as much as the next person but after years of LED-soldering we need something cooler to get us excited. Sure there are RGB LEDs and those are fun too but what comes after that? Well, we have the answer: LED Strips! These are flexible circuit boards with full color LEDs soldered on. They take a lot of LED-wiring-drudgery out of decorating a room, car, bicycle, costume, etc. The ones we carry are also waterproof (although not all are).

There are two basic kinds of LED strips, the "analog" kind and "digital" kind. Analog-type strips have all the LEDs connected in parallel and so it acts like one huge tri-color LED; you can set the entire strip to any color you want, but you can't control the individual LED's colors. They are very very easy to use and fairly inexpensive.

The Digital-type strips work in a different way. They have a chip for each LED, to use the strip you have to send digitally coded data to the chips. However, this means you can control each LED individually! Because of the extra complexity of the chip, they are more expensive.

You can buy waterproof analog-type RGB LED strips by the meter at the Adafruit shop!
This tutorial is for the Analog RGB LED strips only!
Technical specs:
  • 10.5mm (0.41") wide, 3mm (0.12") thick, 100mm (3.95") long per segment
  • Clear waterproof molded
  • 3M adhesive strip on back
  • Maximum 12V @ 60mA draw per strip segment
  • 3 common-anode RGB LEDs per segment
  • LED wavelengths: 630nm/530nm/475nm
  • No microcontroller or chip controller ('analog' only!)
  • (We're working on getting an English datasheet from the manufacturer!)

This guide was first published on Nov 26, 2012. It was last updated on Mar 14, 2024.

This page (Overview) was last updated on Nov 26, 2012.

Text editor powered by tinymce.