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1320 Review
53 Karma

Review on 🚨 Programmable Alarmpore 5m WS2811 LED Strip: Waterproof Dream Magic Color 5050 BRG LED Light with Addressable Control by William Pacino

Revainrating 5 out of 5

As advertised in Rope Lights

I used 9 of these 12 volt strips to outline my house during Halloween and Christmas and they work as advertised. They come with two sets of wires soldered on both ends so you can easily apply power. I replaced the standard male/female connectors by soldering waterproof 3 pin pigtail connectors to the existing wires and shrink wrapping the soldering area. Although these are flexible strips that can wrap around objects (trees, poles, bushes), they will NOT wrap around corners. If you want to outline the windows you will need to cut them at the solder joints and solder them to the new ends. And the soldering points are tiny, tiny, so if your hand is shaking, ask a friend to solder something. Cutting the ends also means you'll need to re-waterproof the area where you cut the strip (and plastic cap) after soldering the new connectors. I used a hot glue gun to fill in the cut ends where the wires are soldered to the strips to keep water out. At first I was concerned that the hot glue would ruin the pixels it was touching, but it didn't affect them. I ended up filling the end of the plastic cap with about 1 1/2 inches after the first pixel I cut them all over and they all work fine. As another reviewer mentioned, when set to white they're not bright white, but rather a slightly duller, almost magenta hue relative to white. It didn't bother me and was almost imperceptible. He's still white. One of the strips I bought was encoded as BRG and all the others were encoded as RBG. Again, not a big deal, but when setting up the light in the Vixen Lights sequencing program, I needed to set the correct color code. If you don't do this, the odd coded bar will flash blue or green when all other bars are flashing red. I used Vixen Lights to sequence the strips to the music and a HolidayCoro Alphapix 4 controller to trigger them. Finally, I powered all 9 strips from a single 360W, 12V power supply. Since my house is only 30 feet from the sidewalk, I turned the strips on at 20% of their brightness. At 50% the lights were too bright and at 100% brightness I probably would have gotten an FAA penalty for disrupting air traffic.

Pros
  • Absolute Legend
Cons
  • Reliability