Wiring the LED Strip to the Backing Panel

We played around with some lighting themes for our Franken-lightning detector using Arduino, an LED strip and the FastLED library and now it’s time to get a start on wiring it up to the backing panel positioning the pixels so they shine through the holes and lightning bolt I carved out.

Soldering the different LED strip segments together took a little practice at first because the contact pads are so small so don’t be surprised if you accidentally bridge contacts on the first few tries. I found it helpful to use the continuity feature of my multimeter to test each end for bridging before moving on to the next set. It’s also important to double check the direction for the data line (little arrow on the strip) to be sure each segment is facing the right way.

I used masking tape to temporarily hold the different portions of LED strip in their place on the board and later used hot glue to secure the strip in place.