hiya!
I got a cheap LED strip with PSU, controller, and IR remote. I didn’t look at it too much, figured it would be easy to stick it under my kitchen cabinets.
however, this thing blinks and fades and whatnot and I’m supposed to switch it over to constant light by repeatedly pressing the remote, which a) works shitty and also b) don’t wanna do that. I just want to plug it into power and it lights up and that’s the end of our interaction.
so, I opened up the PSU/controller and I’d like to locate the spots that give me +12V and GND and I can bypass the whole blinky fadey mess.
it’s a single-sided PCB. the top three wires on the right are for the IR receiver, ignore 'em. the bottom 4 are R, G, B, 12 V, respectively. I’m shorting RGB as it’s a white-only strip.
can you hazard a guess where I’m most likely to succeed?
My assumption with this PCB is that it switches the GND, meaning 12v is always provided to the LEDs. So the trick is to find somewhere that has a permanent GND and then connect all the LED leads to that. But I don’t see a large enough spot to land three new leads, except maybe where R6 is.
You’ll have to verify if my assumption is accurate, although I do wonder if you could just get a different PSU outright. This sounds like a 12v LED strip, so any sufficiently sized 12v wall-wart would also suffice.
Can you also clarify: you want this strip to be always-on and all-white, but the strip uses RGB LEDs? While it does produce white, it might not have a very high CRI and thus may be unpleasant for certain lighting applications. There are dedicated white LED strips which will perform a bit better for color rendition, and that could potentially be an issue if food needs to look appetizing under these cabinets.
it’s a RGB strip but with white LEDs.
so when I bring 12 V to the 12 V lead and then GND to the R, G, or B contact, the respective LEDs light up. when I bring GND to one and then short them (R+G+B) all the LEDs light up.
sure, I tried it with a known good 12 V PSU and it works, but I’d like to use this one and just bypass the light-show circuitry.
When you say all the LEDs light up, do you mean they light up white?
Those LEDs are labelled R G B, so I would have assumed they were single colour LEDs?
they are white LEDs i.e. they shine white. the R G B leads are used to trigger them individually, for the running lights and whatnot. so when I bring 12 V to the V lead and GND to e.g. R, all the LEDs marked R (image) light up. when I then short R with G, then all R and G light up, etc.
Interesting, never heard of that arrangement before.
the whole thing (5 meter strip, remote, PSU/controller) cost like $5 total so I’m guessing that’s some ingenuity at play, like reusing strips meant for RGB lights and sumsuch