In this video i'm going to explain everything about making a sequential led strip, because people hit me up and say i just want a sequential, led strip, i'm going to show you what it takes to actually put one of these things together. So this is a switchback sequential led strip. It's actually apart from unique, led and we've made it extra long. I'm going to show you exactly how to do that in the video and we have it hooked up to one of my old bad 28 channel ghost sequencers.

Now this is a 14 section led strip with white and amber so two different colors. We have 28 channels total hooked up, but because our go sequencer has some blown channels. We don't get to use all of those things, but i'm going to show you what it took to assemble all of this stuff and what to do. If you ever have a blown channel.

That's all coming up all right! I got a whole bunch of stuff right here. My soldering iron is on we're going to take the ghost module and we are going to make a little wire connector to crimp on all of the ribbon cable that we're about to run to this little uh, unique, led strip. So first thing i want to show you: is these things come in little panels like this, and this is what eight of them one two three four yep, so that's eight wide. What i want to do right now is i'm gon na separate two of these little rows here and make one long 16 long section.

Actually, i'm gon na make it 14 long, because that's the exact amount of channels that i have on white and the exact amount that i have on amber. So if i have it 14 sections long, that's going to give me a total of 28 channels on this little strip, and this is a 28 channel ghost sequencer. So, let's separate all this stuff, i'm going to start soldering and then we will connect when this thing is a long 14 section strip. This is 16..

I actually want to take it down to 14.. That's what we're going to be working with. Okay, john just mentioned that these things break really easily. When i snapped it and the reason is, you could see, there's a little line right between the two sections, the pad.

Now, that's basically just pcb, there's no copper! There's no metal going between that and the nice thing is it's very easy to join two sections together like i'm about to do right now, but meanwhile, before they're fused together at all, they are really really easy to accidentally. Snap into different sections so make sure that you're careful handle these things kind of delicately, but what i want to do now, i know that i want to have power running to all of the leds. One connection running through every single led in here right. So to do that, i need to connect the one little section in there which i could barely even read.

I don't even know they're so small, how they say so. I'm gon na figure out which one's which and then we're gon na make a little solder connection that goes across all of the little pads to bridge power throughout and then we'll start making our ground connections after john said, plus 12's the middle, and i believe him, But in case i didn't i'm going to take this picture, look at it on my phone and then blow it up and sure enough. We can see it says 12 plus and then it says other stuff, so 12 plus in the middle. That's all i need to know for now, so i'm going to take where it's separated right here, i'm going to just solder right in the middle, it's going to be a little bit sketchy at first, because when i solder this thing together, i'm going to do it Without any sort of wire all right so now we've got one solid connection.

It doesn't look too pretty, but that's okay, because what i'm going to do next is i'm going to solder and bridge these other pads right here, which is much easier once you got the first one done and then after i've got a couple different ways that this Thing is being held together, i'm going to add a piece of metal right in the middle and i'm going to disconnect the other connections. Does that make sense? Is this exciting because i feel like it's freaking boring it's hard to talk about this, to make it sound? Interesting, here's a couple different things that i have. I have some 24 gauge solid tinned wire and i have some 20 gauge and this stuff is much thicker it's much stronger and i don't need that. I literally just need to bridge a little solder connection.

This thing is freaking easy to lose the end of it, so i always end up sitting here forever bent, so it doesn't do that all right when you are going to work with tiny, annoying annoyingly small electronics like this, i like to do the work ahead of Time so i'm going to bend a little 90 degree bend on that guy, so that thing is actually holding the space between the two pads way better than when there was no wire. That was bridging it. Just the fact that i did that alone actually makes it considerably stronger than it was before, and now i don't need to have those two things there so now, instead of it being bridged on those, it's only bridged right there in the middle. You can do that right off the bat, but it's kind of hard to do that, while everything's all wobbly and actually get a nice solid piece of metal in there.

So if i were to be really freaked out and want need that thing to be 100 lined up and have zero imperfection, then i would mess with it further, but i don't want to let's just start going through and adding a bunch of these little connections. All the way up this thing and as a spoiler alert, i am going to add that little piece of metal to it and connect them all with the 24 gauge all right. So here is our strip and again it's not 100 dialed in right there, but for the purpose of this video you get it. This is 28 channels now, which means 14 sections of amber and 14 sections of white, and each section has four leds.

So if you look it's a bi-color led that shares the power connection and then the ground connection for each of the colors goes to a little pad on the back. So all of these little guys on the bottom here are going to be for amber all of the pads on the top are for white and then the middle is for power right. So those are ground. Connections.

Middle is power. So now i'm going to individually wire wires. So now i'm going to individually connect a bunch of wires to those pads and separate them to the 14 channels. On this ghost sequencer, so step number one is going to be to crimp this on the wire i'm going to use a little bit longer than i need to on this wire right here.

Just so that we can have the sequencer down at one end and we are going to individually start stripping these wires down, and i'm actually going to do it to where channel 1 is going to be the longest wire. So channel 1 and 2 are going to be the longest ones and then three and four, and i'm basically just going to do a bunch of dual channels, and that is going to make it easier to create the lengths that i need. Because every time i add a new wire to the board, i'm gon na have to cut more and more of these wires back. The reason for that is i like to do the wiring staggered, so the wires that are connecting down here will only be this long.

So the go sequencer and then the wire will be that long, but then the ones at the far end they'll be the full length of it instead of just having wires all stringy everywhere. So that is my idea for this. So i need 14 little groups of these guys, so that is four five six seven and then let's, i'm gon na put a little dab of solder at the end of that first and then same thing on the actual circuit board itself, all right! So our very first solder is going to be the white one up top this other one. Next to it.

Now these wires are not strong. I can't even see what i'm doing right now yeah, so these wires are not all buff, and that means that, as i work my way through this thing, i really am going to want to make sure that i have a lot of slack. So i'm going to have to line these things up and then cut every single section. So now that's the right length strip, the two ends and solder them on now after i have a couple different little sections done, it's not going to be putting so much stress on the little board itself.

It'd be nice. If there's a faster way to have these things tinned, but at the end of the day, just adding a little bit of solder to them is it. This is kind of like the follow-up video to what i did. I think three years ago and everybody was asking: what kind of leds did you use? What kind of leds are those? So i think i will just have this, be the video that i linked to from that one.

Now i've got to put this little connector on there, and i know that i want the red section right here being led number one which is down at this end, because i have a little knob right there. So, instead of going in that way, what i need to do, i want to go this way and then i'm going to fold it over the top afterwards. So first i need a good, solid crimp on there yeah. These will will link up all these little tools.

The little kit that you can pick up on amazon, if you want to have all the same stuff get it all lined up proper, make sure that that wire is coming through nice and even and then crimp okay and then i'm actually even going to make a Little crease right here and fold that thing over so there's another pin that snaps down on top of that, and that's so that it's got a nice solid connection and it doesn't come undone because of like pulling because it's actually gon na put all the stress right Here, where it's not actually got any exposed wires oof, i don't even know it. This is just like a freaking old one. So, let's see what's on this, if i'm right, when i connect this, we should have some little leds light up. That's actually possibly a good thing.

Why only that one? What is wrong with this thing? Is that broken yo? What is happening? Yeah, look at this. I'm pretty sure that i accidentally as i was soldering everything disconnected that one tiny little thing, let's see if i can get in there and fix it. If so, the programming should skip all, except for that first one yep. I knew i knew this one had blown channels, but that's pretty dope, so that one blown channel is always stuck on okay, so i have two bad sequencers here.

This one has one blown channel and it was originally on a set of taillights. This one has two blown channels and i don't think it's ever been in anything. So i'm not sure what i did to mess things up on this, but i'm gon na have to use it for a project that has less than 28 channels because it's already got two blown channels on it so check this out. If i hit the turn signal, you could still see it's going through there and if i want to turn that led off right there, that white, one only way that i can do.

That is, if i actually physically remove power from the go sequencer or if i remove the wire, that's going directly to those leds. Meanwhile, it still does cool stuff, some of like the show modes. So you can see the white leds do work except for the one down here. At this end, it looks like looks like these white leds are not getting power for some reason, so we've got some kind of wonky stuff going on, but we do have our nice bright strip we're going to make a fresh sequencer and then connect it to this Setup and make sure that all of our leds are able to fire.

I do want to disconnect it from the ghost real, quick giving power to the main power wire on here and then i'm going to come through and check the actual connections here. So i've got my amber and i've got white, so it was fine. It's just. There was something up with that ghost sequencer amber there white there cool we're going to continue this and on the next one.

What we're going to do is change the programming so for right now, knowing that i'm going to do some more work on this, all i'm going to do right now is disconnect this one wire that's connected on here. So first thing i want to do is remove my power and ground. I just got to make sure i know exactly which leds those are and then i need to remove power from the top part right here. Just that one wire, that's all i'm going to disconnect.

If you ever had to do this, if you ever had to remove just one of the channels on an existing led setup that you had, because you knew that you couldn't turn it off and it was somehow like your ghost module was messed up and you just Want to turn that one led off you could do this just make sure the thing is not going to lay back and make contact again after so bend. That thing out of the way are back in business it's on, but it just isn't doing the weird stuff. So fully sequential is working fine. I could tell that there's something up with the white leds at the far end, and i guess that's just because the channels are about to blow or something.

So we don't have full power right here, but they come on. They actually look okay, so for whatever reason, our programming is not covering this led right here, but i know that it's getting connection because we checked it before we have what we need to do round. Two we're gon na make a go. Sequencer next, that'll be on next tuesday, how tuesday, how to make a sequencer and then we're gon na do some programming with it as well, so stay tuned for how tuesday's coming up.