Double the Power of Your Light Strip Controller!

Typically, when you buy a cheap light strip kit off aliexpress you'll get your strips and an RGB controller. However, if you buy more light strips, (more meters) the number of controllers you get won't go up with it and you'll have a bunch of spools you can't use because you can't daisy chain more than two segments at a time. This is because of resistance, and the longer a wire is, the more overall resistance there is in the circuit. This lowers the voltage over time you won't be able to chain together an unlimited amount of these. This means, however, that the power is only bottlenecked by the length of the strip. Say you put one in a corner, as pictured. If somehow there are two strip connectors instead of one, you could add double the length of lights. And again, because of the bottleneck, we are free to do this without causing the lights to dim. This guide assumes you know basic soldering terms and practices.

Disclaimer: This is the only light strip kit I have purchased, and I have not tried this mod on any other brand or type of strip. I figured this would work myself, and I thought a little soldering job would be fun. I just decided to share this with everyone. Results may vary depending on your power supply, controller, and strip type (especially individually addressable lights. I have no clue how those would react to this mod.)

• RGB light strips
• RGB controller
• An extra RGB connector, you can use the one at the end of a light strip segment.
• soldering iron
• solder (mainly just for tinning the wires)
• multimeter set to continuity (very optional, only used to check for solder bridges, which you can easily do with your eyes)
• cutting tool (doesn't really matter, I used an xacto knife)

If you're setting up your line of RGB lights you'll probably end up having a connector at the end you can use for this step. Remember to cut at the marked line! You can get the connector from that piece you just cut off (cut the connector off from that piece). Strip each wire and tin them.

Depending on the kind of controller you have, the steps might be a bit different. You basically just want to solder another connector where the other one is soldered, with two wires on each pad. On mine, there was a bunch of space between each pad so it was easy to solder in. My LEDs are 4 pin, however, you might have something different. For some reason, black was white on the strip connector, but everything is still the same. Test for bridges with a multimeter, but I suck at soldering and it went fine. You'll probably do better than me. Putting it back together was a bit of a struggle, and I had to widen the hole the wires come out of for it to fit. It was really soft plastic, and an xacto blade cut through it like butter. I'm sure you could use safety scissors if you're really desperate. No need to pull out a dremel for this.

(sorry about the blurry image! I didn't know it was that bad until I copied it to my computer.)

Plug in your controller and test it out. Both strips should work, and they should be giving out the exact same signal. This was just a little project (little is an understatement, the whole mod process took me like two minutes, it took longer to get up to the ceiling to take off and put back the controller than it did to solder the connector) but it made a huge change, and now my entire room is glowing in glorious rainbow color. I have seen splitters for sale, but if you have a soldering iron, this mod will save you a bunch of time and money. If you immediately lost hope in this instructable as soon as you read the word "soldering" I found one of these splitters on Amazon. This isn't an affiliate link, by the way, I don't even know how to make one of those.