Set up really cool, inexpensive LED strip lighting

Today I finally finished this cool project of installing LED strip lighting around a vanity mirror. I used a spool of a 5M SMD 5050 warm+cool strip with 300 individual lights which I got online for under $20. These are the non-waterproof type for indoor purposes. The back side of the strip has adhesive and you just peel off the covering and it sticks very well onto a wall. Since they are LED’s they run cool and do not give off heat. There are also aluminum tracks available to adhere LED strips to for mounting but for this project I wanted to keep it simple.

The strip is able to be cut at designated points. I cut 4 pieces to go around the mirror. The pieces need to be soldered together. The trick to make the soldering easy is to flux the four little copper contact points on each junction (two on the end of each strip), and to flux the wire ends that will connect them. Also try to cut the wires as close to the exact length as possible (see image below).

Fluxing simply involves applying the soldering gun to the contact point/wire end and getting a little bit of solder on it. With the contacts and wire ends fluxed they adhere easily together when they are held together and the soldering iron is applied. The connections should be strong.

I don’t have the best soldering iron for small electronics but managed to make it work. Always ventilate well with fresh, outdoor air when soldering and avoid breathing in the smoke which contains lead.

Here’s a close up of the actual strip and one of the junctions:

You can see the two copper ovals with the text “DC 12V” printed on either side. These occur every few inches along the strip and are where it can be cut. Be sure when soldering them together that the polarity matches (+ side connects to + side; – to -).

For power I got a 12 volt/6 amp AC to DC power supply that was listed specifically for 5050 LED strip lights and was under $10. Some supplies I’ve seen are 3 or 4 amps but I got a power supply with a slightly higher amount of amps just to make sure it runs cooly and smoothly. (See my previous post on power supplies about this) I also got a female power connector which was listed as being for a 5050 LED strip, and a 12V LED dimmer that was listed for LED strips. See images below:

As you can see above – actually the photo doesn’t convey it that well – it looks pretty amazing. I would say that this makes excellent, very cool-looking light to illuminate somehwere. But I’m not sure about the quality of this light for use with a vanity mirror. LED lighting is still evolving and has a way to go yet before commercial strips like this are available which output a smooth, even, continuous spectrum of light.

If you look at a plot of the power output across the range of the visible spectrum from an old-fashioned incandescent bulb you will see what looks like a more-or-less smooth line running from the low (red) and all the way to the high (blue) end. There will not be any major peaks or valleys in the line.

With LED lighting however there will be parts of the graph where the line unexpectedly peaks and other places where its low. This means that the there is not an even distribution of photons at all light frequencies available to depict objects to the eye (or digital sensor in camera).

Because in the places where there are the valleys essentially the photons are no there, there’s no actual way to just compensate for the missing parts of the spectrum by tweaking an image (or tweaking your makeup).

But – the time is coming soon, I’m quite sure, when we are going to have kickass LED’s available with excellent color spectrum characteristics and which are affordable. We just have to be patient. Not only that, but already there exist wireless controllers and its possible to do things like have multi-color LED’s connected to controllers which vary the colors according to sound or other input.

I would like to have multi-color strips around the entire studio and be able to have the color and brightness vary subtly over time throughout the day. I also have some inexpensive LED string lights which have preset patterns but would like to be able to have something where I can create my own patterns.