hiya!
I got a cheap LED strip with PSU, controller, and IR remote. I didn't look at it too much, figured it would be easy to stick it under my kitchen cabinets.
however, this thing blinks and fades and whatnot and I'm supposed to switch it over to constant light by repeatedly pressing the remote, which a) works shitty and also b) don't wanna do that. I just want to plug it into power and it lights up and that's the end of our interaction.
so, I opened up the PSU/controller and I'd like to locate the spots that give me +12V and GND and I can bypass the whole blinky fadey mess.
it's a single-sided PCB. the top three wires on the right are for the IR receiver, ignore 'em. the bottom 4 are R, G, B, 12 V, respectively. I'm shorting RGB as it's a white-only strip.
can you hazard a guess where I'm most likely to succeed?
Bottom leg of the transistor to the left of the signal wires would be my guess for ground, do you have a multimeter to check?
Looks like a large ground plane to the left of the transistors, so you might be able to scratch away the coating and solder directly to it.
I do, and when I check the 12 V wire, it fluctuates between 12 and 5 V (that's the blink/fade thing) so I need 12 V before it gets mangled. where am I most likely to get it from?
edit: how do I check if the plane is ground with a multimeter?
Are you checking between the 12V and one of these legs? It's typically connected to ground in these types of controllers. Here's the SOT23 pinoutfor reference if that is the same package.