1m WS2812B Gold Wire 100LEDs 100Pixels Flexible Black PCB

...and they're at 1cm spacing. Which is what I was after. Thanks BTF.

Very good

First up, I’ll talk about the LED strips themselves: As an electrical engineer I can say these are well made strips! Flex PCBs can vary in thickness and quality. These appear to be made from quality flex material with wide 1oz copper traces for power. Each individual LED on the strip has its own 0.1uF decoupling capacitor, which is important to keep communication between LEDs from glitching. (A lot of cheaper strips skip this!) The only issue I ran into was the first strip I ordered didn’t have any adhesive tape on the back of it! I contacted BTF Lighting on Amazon and they replied right away, letting me know that the adhesive should have been on the strip and that someone had goofed at the factory. They provided me an Amazon link to a roll of 10mm wide double sided tape and offered to refund me that amount (around $10) if I wanted to just order it and put it on myself, instead of going through the whole return thing. That’s pretty good customer service in my book, so kudos to BTF! (The second strip *did* have the tape installed as advertised, so I assume this was an oversight at the factor like they said.) Each strip pulls just under 5A with all LEDs set to white at maximum brightness. Cooling didn’t seem to be issue, even rolled up the strip never got so hot I couldn't hold it by hand. There were no dead pixels in either strip and brightness and color were uniform and matched between strips. Now, onto my project: Awhile back I picked up a couple of those Himalayan salt lamps at a Goodwill (I know they don’t actually emit “positive ions” or have any health benefits, I just think they look really cool). They were just begging to be customized, so I decided to replace the stock incandescent nightlight style bulbs with WiFi connected RGB LED lighting! My “lamps” both had (approximately) 3” diameter holes drilled in the bottom of them for the bulbs, so I figured it would be easy to make a cylindrical replacement. These 100 led per meter strips ended up working perfect. Originally, my plan was to wrap the LED strips *around* a 2” diameter piece of PVC piping (cut to 120mm in length). I went for the 100 LED/m instead of the more dense 144 LED/m because I thought the latter may have trouble bending enough to wrap around the small diameter of the pipe. This turned out to be a non-issue as I ended up cutting seven sections of 10 LEDs (100mm) off the roll and mounting them vertically on the pipe; this allows better alignment of the LEDs and easier management of effects in the controlling software. The 100 LED/m strips also have the advantage that the LEDs are all spaced exactly 10mm apart, which makes the math easy! First I wrapped the pipe in two layers of heat resistant Kapton tape, to prevent the pipe melting when I soldered to the LED strips. Next I adhered the seven 100mm sections of LED strip to the pipe, leaving around 10mm of free space on the bottom, I also added three small tie wraps for extra retention. Then I soldered a wire from the DO pad on the top of each section to the DI pad on the bottom of the next section; similarly I soldered very short (3mm) 20 AWG solid wire jumpers from the 5V and GND pads between sections, creating a power bus. The result is that all seven sections act as they original did before I cut them, i.e., a single strip. I also took a 1200uF capacitor and fit it snuggly in the center of the PVC pipe, then soldered the leads to the power pads of the last section. (This helps smooth out the voltage.) Finally, I took some insulating foam designed for 2” PVC piping and cut two 10mm long sections off, then slid one over the top and bottom of the pipe. These turned out to be the perfect size to act as “buffers” to hold the whole assembly centered inside the salt lamp. For the controller, I used an ESP8266 based D1-Mini mounted inside a small 2”x3”x1” enclosure. I drilled a 1/4” hole in one end of the enclosure and a 5/8” hole in the other end. A 5.5x2.5mm barrel jack was mounted in the larger hole and a small rubber grommet was mounted in the smaller hole, with the 3-pin LED connector pigtail fed through the grommet. The software running on the controller is the open source WLED (available on GitHub), which provides an easy to use web based interface for setting the color, brightness and/or effects of the connected LEDs, plus it integrates with Blynk, Alexa, WARLS, MQTT, Home Assistant and more! The attached video shows the fire flicker and rainbow effects running in my smaller lamp. The video really doesn’t do it justice, it looks even better in person. The salt makes a perfect diffuser and people honestly think there’s really a candle inside when the flame effect is going.

I connected these to a DMX dimmer/decoder for control from a light console. They work well, and they are BRIGHT! I'm using them to backlight a cross at my church. they are mounted to the back, facing the wall, which is about 4 inches away. I only need to run the white at 20% brightness, and the other colors at 5-10% to steer the color to what I want.

I purchased these led's to use for under glow lighting in my new computer build to light up the bottom of my new case under the Celestial Glass. I purchased just enough for my project as I didn't have an use for more. Or so I thought. I took great care with these and tested them all the way to right before I taped them down. But for some reason, after taping them down, about ten inches of the line just quit working. Nothing was shorting them out. I spent over an hour trouble shooting this issue before I finally figured out that something in the way it excepts programing just died in that stretch. I tried bypassing led's, shortening my strand, cutting off what I thought was bad sections to no avail. So I had to compromise my build since I didn't have the length I needed for my original design. But except for that, the rest of these are very bright and have good color. Over all, I would buy again but make sure I had extra next time just in case. Oh and yes, those are little fishes in there. I figured if the new cases looked like fish tanks, why not just go with it. The nice part about these little guys is they don't eat much : )

The strip has two ends, you need to figure out which end has the input and which one has the output. I figured it out by looking at the DIN and DO labels on the chips. There are also arrows pointing towards the output. The LEDs are very bright -- almost like flash lights. I bought the non waterproof version. Next time I may get the waterproof version not necessarily to keep out water but just to cover the exposed wires to prevent short circuit. The per pixel price seems high compared to other vendors. I tested it with a premade controller.

light strip stopped working. i messaged the oem and they weren't helpful blaming power supply, controller etc. it worked until it didn't and oem isn't easy to work with