Power Connector

Plug your male JST connector into the female plug coming from your battery and take careful note of which side is power and which is ground.

Slide a small piece of heat shrink onto one of the power and one of the ground wires you just attached to your LED strand.  Carefully solder each of these wires onto the JST connector and cover with the heat shrink.

Now we're going to add hardcore strain relief to this connector.  It's the piece that takes the most tugging and wear and tear, so we want to be sure it won't break while you're changing batteries (in the dark, in the middle of the night, most likely).

Slide a large 1/2" or 3/8" piece of heat shrink over the connector, leaving the front open but covering the back and the connections you just made completely.  Don't heat it yet!

Take a hot glue gun and fill the back side of the heat shrink with hot glue.  Then, while your glue is still liquid, hit the whole assembly with a heat gun to shrink the heat shrink in a controlled manner.  Be careful not to get glue inside the connector itself.

Solder your on/off switch inline with the red wire coming from your power connector.

Then, create your power harness:  Twist together the red wires from each cyber-dred.  Twist another red wire to the one coming from your power switch.  Connect all 4 of these wires together and cover with heat shrink.

Repeat with the ground wires.

Connect the "out" wires from strip #3 to the "in" wires for strip #4.  Aren't you glad you marked these earlier?

Now you have one free power wire, one ground wire, one data wire and one clock wire.  Connect these to your Feather as shown.  Clock goes to 11 and data goes to 13.

Gently set your wig down or place it on a wig head and plug a battery in.  Make sure your feather powers up!  It's time for a test run. 

First, upload the dotstar Strandtest code to your Feather.  All 6 strands should light up in sequence.  Be sure you can run Strandtest before proceeding any further.

Next, upload the OPCserver code to your Feather in the Arduino environment, making sure you've edited the sketch with your local wifi network IP address and password. 

Launch Processing and open the OPCstrandtest code. Edit these lines to reflect your IP address and strand length.

OPC opc       = new OPC(this, "192.168.0.101", 7890);  //your IP adress here
int numPixels = 60; // Set this to actual strand length

Press "play".  If all goes according to plan, you'll see the strandtest code run on your wig.  Congratulations!  Let's secure the components and then it's time for the fun stuff.

If your strandtest code doesn't run, don't despair.  This is pretty complicated.  Some things to check:

  • Is your wig powered up with a battery and the switch turned on? 
  • Are your IP address and password correct in the OPCserver Arduino sketch?
  • Is the IP address correct in the OPCstrandtest Processing sketch?
  • Is your computer on the same Wifi network as the OPCserver sketch?
  • Are all the requisite libraries installed?

More troubleshooting tips over at Phil Burgess' Lightship guide.

This guide was first published on Apr 07, 2016. It was last updated on Mar 08, 2024.

This page (Final Wiring) was last updated on Mar 23, 2016.

Text editor powered by tinymce.