I ran a strip of WS2811, 12 volt LED’s in my home for years with a program from Bruhautomation which has kind of long since been obsolete and the author has archived the project.  Served me well for years.

The new kid on the block for controlling LED’s for effect lighting is WLED by Aircookie.  Awesome project.   For some reason though the hardware I’ve always used to drive the LED strip wasn’t working reliably with my new WLED setup.   Weird things like having the first 3 LED’s light up uncommanded while the strip was powered off and other things like not retaining the color or brightness from the last known state.

Translation:  Data corruption.

The data signal that powers the LED comes from the ESP8266 chip and is a 3.3 volt signal.  For a long run of lights to keep things working correctly we may need to amplify the signal to 5 volts.

This is where something called a Logic Level Shifter comes into play.

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LED Effect Lighting

We’ve all seen those decorative LED strips in the big box stores.  They are either controlled by a remote (who needs another remote control?) or by an app.  I am here to tell you that the cheap Chinese lights and their apps are essentially spyware.

So to be safe we want to use an Open Source solution to power our lights. Enter, WLED by Aircookie.  Before we go down the rabbit hole I want you to realize that this isn’t the typical geek project.

It is EASY!  Anyone can do this.  But to make it easy you’ll need a few things that could be optional if you cannot solder or you don’t have a drawer full of electronic geek stuff.

BEFORE I TALK TOO MUCH AND SCARE YOU OFF WE ARE GOING TO DO THIS ESSENTIALLY:

• PLUG IN A CHIP TO A COMPUTER
• OPEN A PROGRAM AND FLASH THAT CHIP WITH ONE BUTTON CLICK
• HOOK UP 5 WIRES

There are a lot of different LED strips and your selection will depend on what you are doing.  Because I put a 4′ strip behind a workbench I used 5 volt strips.  If you are doing a pretty long run, a 5 volt strip might not power all your lights without additional power injection.  12 volt strips MIGHT also require a level shifter on the data wires to get the signal down stream.  Your ESP8266 chip will send a 3.3v data signal out.  To make a long run you might need 5 volts.  A level shifter turns a 3.3 volt signal into a 5 volt signal.  But I digress.  Let’s keep this simple.

On to the Build Of Materials:

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