I have wanted to light the underside of the treads of a spiral staircase for a long time. I recently scored some HUE Lightstrips Plus and thought that would be the way to go but I have quickly hit the wall.
My goal was to have a one to two foot strip of dim-able LEDs (required) with adjustable color (wanted but not needed) on the underside of each of twelve treads. Due to the nature of the staircase and physical constraints, one long strip can not be used. Each individual strip must be wired to the others via a series (or some series-parallel) arrangement.
While the new HUE strips are cut-able, and extendable, if you need to cut them, everything beyond the cut spot is dead to you (including the extendable connector). And while my soldering skills are OK, soldering anything to the very fine flexible ribbon, by hand, would be near impossible for me.
This would mean 12 lightstrip kits, and wiring 12 supplies, and wasting 75% of the kits’ LEDs.
So now I have to rethink this. Anyone here done such a project and can offer some advice?
TIA
1 Like
tgauchat
(ActionTiles.com co-founder Terry @ActionTiles; GitHub: @cosmicpuppy)
2
Perhaps WigWag will be shipping their LED strips soon and I can see what the physical design is (I finally received my hub (Relay) from them, but no devices yet).
There’s a multi-channel Fibaro Z-Wave level device that I think is designed for RGB strips too, no?
Yeah… I think the way to go is generic RGB strips with the Fibaro RGBW Micro Controller. But so many questions about wiring the load of 12 separate strips, and whether one controller will handle it.
bamarayne
(Jason "The Enabler" as deemed so by @Smart)
4
Take a look at Amazon and search for led tape extenders… I use these for other led strips, they might have something for these.
I found these with a quick search.
But I don’t think they will work for you… The simplest going may be brushing up on your solder skills… Sorry
1 Like
tgauchat
(ActionTiles.com co-founder Terry @ActionTiles; GitHub: @cosmicpuppy)
5
Solder points on some types of LED strips are actually pretty easy to work with. I’m the worst at soldering, but actually have successfully soldered over 180 connections on stripes of addressable WS2811 chips… Well… A few connections came loose, but that’s because these were for costumes and subject to a lot of pull…
i was trying something similar with the Hue Strips (Gen2). Ended up buying an OSRAM kit and some generic RGBW strips and connectors to go with it. You can go upto 12ft of strips with one controller and the included power supply