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 -.
I like to strip around 1/2" and fold the bare wires over onto themselves before I stuff 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 our 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.
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!
Page last edited March 20, 2024
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