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?

  • litchralee@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    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.