I scored some of these analog RGB strips and needed a way to power them, and to be able to control the colours.

Initial prototyping showed that I needed about 20V to be useful, and I could easily switch each colour via a MOSFET driven from a microcontroller. First attempt was with an Arduino, then another with an ESP8266. At this point, I realised that you have to choose the MOSFET gate voltage to suit the logic, so common IRF540 devices won’t work with the 3.3 V available to ESP devices. I selected IRLB8271 instead, and this works.

I have tried a few different circuits, involving different coding.

• Cycling through colours
• Random colour cycle
• Running a web server, using a web page to choose colours

Now to get from the breadboard to a finished circuit …

Useful links

• What’s the best LED strip for your project? (Random Nerd Tutorials)
• $10 DIY WiFi RGB LED mood light with ESP8266 (Random Nerd Tutorials)
• LM2596 Buck converter (Instructables)