These LED strips are fun and glowy. There are 60 warm white LEDs per meter, and you can control the entire strip at once with any microcontroller and a power transistor. The way they are wired, you will need a 9-12VDC power supply and connect directly. If you want to dim the strip, use any NPN or N-channel MOSFET (although the big powerful kind is good for a large strip) and PWM the input.
We splurged and got the weatherproof kind with white background color. There's a 3M adhesive strip on the back which should stick to most smooth surfaces. Great for architectural lighting (under-counter or under-cabinet), decorating your bicycle or car, making lamps, etc. You'll need a lot of power to light these up, we suggest our 12V 5A supply. To connect it to a power supply, pick up a 2.1mm female jack and wire it to the strip with some heat shrink. For portable use, we suggest a 8xAA battery holder
Please Note: these strips are weatherproof so they'll be more rugged than uncoated strips, but they not designed for long term submersion in water, especially chlorinated water, or exposed to UV (eg sunlight) for extended periods of time. They are for indoor use or light outdoor use without direct sun/water. That means you cannot put them into a pool, lake, aquarium, etc. The silk-screening and LED brightness of the strips may vary slightly from reel to reel. Once the adhesive backing has been removed, the strips are not returnable!
You can cut this stuff pretty easily with wire cutters, there are cut-lines every 5cm (3 LEDs each), and trim off the weatherproof cover with a hobby knife. Solder to the 0.1" copper pads and you're good to go.
They come in 5 meter reels and are sold by the meter! If you buy 5m at a time, you'll get full reels. If you buy less than 5m, you'll get a single strip, but it will be a cut piece from a reel which may or may not have a connector on it. If the piece comes from the end of the reel, the connector may be on the output end of the strip!
We don't have a tutorial specifically for the white LED strips but they're basically identical to the RGB LED strips we carry, except that instead of 3 different colored LEDs there is only warm white so we suggest our tutorial on those
When purchasing a full reel, there will be two wires on either side you can connect directly to 12V. Be sure to try both 'directions' as the wire colors do not necessarily indicate which wire is the ground wire. It will not damage the strip if you connect it backwards so if it isn't lighting, try the other way! When purchasing a smaller piece, connect the RGB pads together and tie those to ground and connect the 12V+ pad to 12VDC
