ALITOVE WS2811 RGB LED Pixels Light Individually Addressable 12mm Diffused Full Color Bullet Pixels DC 5V IP68 Waterproof 500pcs for Outdoor LED Screen Billboard House Halloween Christmas Decor

I love these! I have used them on a couple different things so far, originally I was going to use them with my computers to extend the ARGB set ups... It was then that I learned many of the strip lights do NOT use RGB color order for the data. These use GRB, the green and blue are swapped compared to what is usually RGB order on computer ARGB lighting. Because of this, I have used them with ESP32 based WLED controllers and been very happy with them! So far, I have only found one of these types of LED strings that is RGB order, and I was actually very surprised to see that! So I will use them with my computers...

These strands have an effective resistance of 0.8Ω. At full power, this 5V-rated strand draws nearly 10W and drops 1.37V! That means the very next strand in the chain isn't getting enough voltage, and the whites turn yellow as the blues drop out. You can mitigate that problem by dropping the brightness substantially in software, but now they're not as bright. Basically, despite being connector-ed for easy chaining, chaining 5V strands end-to-end doesn't really work out. I spent my weekend soldering in a parallel run of 14ga wire to the supplied pigtails to keep the voltage boosted, which kind of defeats the purpose of the chaining connectors. I bought some 12V versions. They draw less current so they drop less voltage, plus they can withstand a much bigger drop of about 5V (to 7V) before color distortion appears. At 7V they're noticeably dimmer (about 25% brightness), but it would be easy to level the brightness in software. If you're happy with 25%, you could chain 14-15 strings together (200 feet of lights!) without trouble. Or use shorter chains and run at 50%, which is perceptually very close to full brightness.

I have a 5 meter Alitove RGB strip that my wife commandeered for our last holiday party to light up our outdoor bar. It wasn’t the best for the task because the strip is flat and doesn’t turn corners well. I bought one of these to check out and will be buying more. I’m using one of Alitove’s $11 RF controllers to drive the strip because I don’t really care about programming a micro controller with a bunch of patterns and their controller has a lot of variations - plus our guests found them really cool and trippy, so that’s always a plus. While testing the new strand in my lab I did note that the 5-Volt strand peaked at 2.77 Amps with all LEDS set to white and full brightness. As someone else mentioned you will need at least 3 Amps per strand to supply them. My lab supply is variable so I got to see that the strands stay reasonably bright down to about 3 volts, and either the LEDs or my controller stops changing the LEDS at about 2.33 Volts. Current draw with all LEDs set to white and full brightness at 3.3 Volts was 900 milliAmps. At 5 Volts I found the lights to be almost uncomfortably bright but this was sitting within 3 feet of them. Plenty bright for my taste. The power wire is I think a Metric gauge that is somewhere between 24 and 26 AWG. At least, that’s the way it fits in my Klein strippers. While some may complain about this, especially when wanting to run more than one strand, it is the cost of having a smaller wire bundle with a good deal of flexibility. The last point, and what almost cost them a star, is that like others my Red and Green channels are swapped. Not a big deal for my application but it will keep me from mixing and matching with other strips and panels.

The string of LEDs that I received works on 5 volts and the LEDs are individually addressable RGB. They worked right out of the box. I am driving them with an Arduino Uno and an external 5 volt power supply.

The wires for power (and data but that is less critical) are smaller than I’d like. They are marked as 20 AWG but when measured with a caliper they come out to closer to 22 and are not pure copper. Due to wire size, if you are intending to run these at full brightness I recommend feeding at most half a strand and making sure if there is a wiring fault (like a disconnect) there isn’t any way the small strand wires can accidentally carry more current. I’ve decided to go with 5V models for other reasons. The 12 V ones take more power overall although the current is less, but this just means more power feed points.

Installed these as semi-permanent onto my home, just in time for Halloween. Colors are great, and they are easy to program against. I used an ESP8266 and FastLED. My only complaint is that not every bulb were perfectly round so some were harder to install into a half inch hole, and occasionally the distance from bulb to bulb was a little shorter than specified making it harder to install into pre-drilled holes every 2.5 inches. Keep that in mind when planning for your installation. As with any LED strip, you need to run a separate power line to tap into the line every strand or 2. This is standard.

I had originally bought a string of these LEDs for a holiday decoration, but quickly realized just how useful these can be for all sorts of other projects! They pretty much take all the guesswork out of driving RGB LEDs--no more current calculations, drivers, etc. Just free up one GPIO pin and hook up as many of these as you want! These LEDs are very bright and are matched relatively well to one another. Channel-to-channel matching is slightly off (A 255,255,255 white shows up pinkish), but that could just be due to the voltage drop across the string. Speaking of, this string of LEDs is pretty power-hungry, so be sure to have a suitable power supply that can provide at least 3A. Apparently, the Red and Green channels on my string were switched around, compared to all my other WS2812B-based LED strings, so that's something to watch out for when writing code for these. Other than that, the rest of the process was pretty painless, and they should work just fine with any WS2812B software.

A very nice set of sturdy, diffused, neopixels with JST SM 3 connectors (male for connection to data in, female to daisy chain more compatible neopixels). I used these with a 5V power, either from a dedicated 5V, 2amp 2.1mm barrel connected wall wart power supply, or from a powered USB hub over USB 2. You can use these with a small traditional LED light controller, or control them through a computer or microprocessor. Only one GPIO pin is needed. Use separate 5V power for the lights if using a 3.3V logic level microcontroller such as the Raspberry Pi Pico. These might work with 3.3V but I think the spec sheet says 3.7 minimum. Neopixels can use a good amount of current if used with certain colors at highest intensity. Therefore, I use a dedicated 5V DC power supply with at least 2 amps and up to 10 amps for large LED matrix displays.