ESP8266 Community Forum

Have a few basic questions to get this project started.

My plan is to run 4m total of 5v led strip; 2m in warm white and 2m in cool white, side-by-side.

1) These strips do not have data pins, so how would I go about controlling the brightness of the strips?

2) Is it possible to control the 2 strips independently of each other?

I'm hoping that I can program a sunrise-style fade effect between the two strips by fading in warm white, transitioning to cool white, then fading out again to turn off.
I was thinking that by using the 5v strips in conjunction with the esp8226, I could create a circuit without transformers and powered by a simple USB adapter.

I'm completely new to esp8226 and similar products, so I was just hoping for some insight if I am on the right path for this project, or if I'm overlooking something major. Thanks.

It seems to me that I can use an analog RGB strip example for guidance.

I'm thinking from the ESP pins I can run to a 2 channel logic level converter, wired in series with the project's 5v power, then run each channel to the positive end of each strip.

Is there any reason to use 2 MOSFET chips over a 2 channel board?

...or get yourself a few meters of WS2812B strip; there are a lot of "NeoPixel" examples for Arduino/ESP8266 available on-line.

For the electronics side of the story, power the strip with 5V, use a common ground and tie the DIN (Data-IN) pin to any GPIO-port of the ESP (this is how the WeMos NeoPixel-shield works).

themrmurray wrote:My plan is to run 4m total of 5v led strip; 2m in warm white and 2m in cool white, side-by-side.

1) These strips do not have data pins, so how would I go about controlling the brightness of the strips?

2) Is it possible to control the 2 strips independently of each other?

1) The following specifies a logic level mosfet. But the ESP8266 only has a 3 volt high so the mosfet should have a full on switch point of about 2.5 volts maximum.
As long as the led strip can work off 5 volts then you are good to go. I used strips with a 12 volt adapter and a similar circuit. I forget what mosfet I used.


2) Yes. Duplicate the above for the second string.