Getting started with 12v LEDs for sign making.
Note: This is an appendix/companion article to a YouTube Video I published this weekend called “Lighting a sign with LEDs for beginners. You should check it out! However, I glazed over some ideas that I’d like to touch in further detail. Also, it’s hard to hold a camera while actively soldering, so consider this my attempt at correcting some of what I missed. Finally, the back of this was insanely hacky, so I cleaned it up just a touch. Enjoy!
Cleaning up the backside.
I played it pretty fast and loose with the wire lengths. It was quick, and hoenstly, I was afraid to take too long fat fingering my way through a real tight wire run. To make matters worse, these were probably 7 years old LED strips from a Burning Man bin and the adhesive was not really adhering very, hence the gaffe tape. So, here I will:
Shorten the wire that connects the white and red strips and reconnect with solder.
To avoid having to heatshrink the tiny wires while the thing is already affixed down, I will use a dollop of hot glue to lock the exposed red and black wires in place away from each other. While I have the hot glue gun out, I can go hit the corners to keep them tacked down a little and to prevent them from shorting out in the event something does come loose.
My pal Wax made a great suggestion to use a zip tie in the gap to act as stress relief.
About those barrel connectors
I wanna revisit this topic in a little more graphic style detail since I may not have been super clear with the visuals. Also, around the 5-minute mark, I said they have “2 pins” which doesn’t really make sense- they have two wires, a red and black, and work in male/female pairs, with usually the positive (red) being the innermost piece of the barrel. Anyhow, not really rocket science- keep the red to red and black to black, with + always being red.
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Once you’ve got your barrels connected to your wire, you need to connect some power. A couple obvious and time tested power options are a 12v AC adapter or a 12v Battery pack.
I initially wanted to try finding a Barrel Connection/USB pigtail. One of my earlier projects used USB powered LEDs and that was awesome, as I could use whatever power source with a usb port I had handy- battery, AC adapter, car adapter, whatever. However that connection came on a pre-assembled roll, and I wanted the flexibility of making my own out of the rolls I have on hand. Unfortunately, the USB/barrel cables I bought failed miserably and I had to scrap that idea. If you know of a USB/barrel connector pigtail good for this application, let me know. Otherwise, I’ll keep looking. But I can NOT recommend the 3-pack I purchased.
Oh-speaking of not recommending- I mentioned this in the video, but I think they are so bunk, I will mention again, with pictures. The cheap little “solder free” crimp-on connectors are garbage. I know it might look fiddly or sound scary if you’ve never done it, but try soldering. It’s really the way to go when working with this stuff.
Wrapping up
Consider this the very basic 101 on this topic. I have several spring projects that are more complicated that should be a good source for some more instructional fodder / work in progress thoughts. But even this quick dumb little sign was fun to make and actually looks kinda cool in the shop. I’ll close with a photo of the backside while it’s on, as well as a couple of shots of it in it’s final resting place, both with lights on and off.
