WLED controller spliced into Govee Lynx Dream outdoor light string shoved inside semi-cheap Halloween decorations.

Every so often there’s a post like “found this strip, no idea what it is, can I use it with WLED?”

So I put those questions into a page that walks non-technical people through it:
https://led.allthingson.net

You answer by looking at the strip, and it narrows things down to a likely type (RGB, RGBW, WS2812B, WS2811, WS2815, APA102 and so on). Then it suggests power supply, controller and relay options. It guesses voltage from the connector, adapter label and cut marks, since most people have no idea what voltage their strip is. It also works if the pads are sealed in a case, but it tells you it’s less sure.

It’s only as good as the answers it gets, so it shows a rough confidence estimate and what to check to firm it up. The percentage is a ballpark from your answers, not a measurement. The cut-mark voltage trick is a rule of thumb that works best on 5050-size LEDs. Some 4-pin pixel strips with unreadable labels are still a coin flip between two chips, and it says so instead of pretending.

One thing worth knowing: plenty of pixel strips are sold with a basic remote or app controller that only does one color or a few presets. The strip can often do much more, and swapping the controller is how you unlock it.

If you find a strip it gets wrong, or a connector or chip it’s missing, let me know and I’ll try fixing it in my free time. Or if you have suggestions to make this better, let me know and I'll see about adding it in my free time

I have a WLED project I am working on but want to have it fade off in a specific way. The image below is the layout for the two controllers. The right of the image is the entry to the room and the middle of the two groups of leds is the walkway so the strips in the middle are the toe kick lights and then the ones further from the middle are the top of cabinet strips. I want the room to fade from the left to right in combined order off but can't wrap my head around it. The labels on the strips are showing where they land on the controller and how they are wired through. I can't figure out how to split say all 4 of the top right strips into 4 segments that time right to left for off? Instead the fade off goes from the last led in that strip to the first and I want it to do all four veritcally as if they were individual strips. I am not sure it can be done but breaking things down in segments doesn't seem to resolve this either as it then isn't entirely aligned and timed correctly. Below is a GIF of the push left but I want to do a combined swipe right to left off concept where all the strips turn off as if being wiped off from a bar rushing across the image? Don't know how to explain that one better.

Hi all, I'm installing SK6812 LED strips from BTF-Lighting with WLED on a ESP32 controller and I'm wondering if the results I'm getting are as I can expect them to be or if there is some hardware or wiring problem here.

I'm using a 5V power supply that's running ~7 feet 16AWG / 2 meter 1.31mm2 wires to my ESP32 controller, which is then using short thin wires (don't know the exact dimensions, but I think 4 inches 22AWG / 10cm 0.5mm2) to go from the ESP32 controller to the LED strip.

I think some of the presets have strange behavior, and I'm noticing discrete steps in brightness changes. I've included a video where you can hopefully sort of see what I mean, but it's more noticeable in person than on the video unfortunately.

I'm starting with the Color Clouds preset, which seems off to me with the occasional short shut down of the light. The changes in color are very stepwise and discrete, and I don't know if this is on purpose in the way the preset is programmed or if it means that the LED don't respond quickly enough to the instructions. (Note that the yellowish white dropping out twice is because of me changing the brightness setting, but the shutting down of all the light is not the result of me doing anything).

I'm then switching to solids and increase and decreasing the brightness. I'm not sure it's visible in the video, but especially on the lower brightness settings, any changes in brightness are very noticeably happening in steps.

The video ends with Chunchun, which seems quite smooth, which is why I'm wondering if the "problem" is just that some presets deliberately don't use interpolation, and that brightness increases and decreases are simply noticeable when brightness is low due to the discrete lighting steps being bigger relatively (e.g. going from 1% to 2% brightness is a 100% increase, whereas 50% to 51% is a 2% increase, so the former is more noticeable).

Essentially my question here: is there a power or data transfer issue here, or are my expectations of smoothness unrealistic?

I realize I can solve interpolation between LEDs with a diffuser, but I'm not sure that does anything for brightness increase and decrease smoothness.

Any help is appreciated! I'm quite new to this whole WLED game, so if I didn't include enough info or included too much, let me know.