I wanted to create a fun and festive Arduino project for the Christmas holidays, so I decided to create my own DIY led strip lights. This project does require a solder machine so keep that in mind!

Supplies

LEDs of choice (depending on how long you want to create your LED strip, the amount of LEDs will differ)
Jumper wires (if you don't have a very long uncut jumper wire, you can use multiple wires and solder them together to create one long strip for your LEDs)
Soldering machine
Arduino
Breadboard
220-330 ohm resistor
Scissors or wire cutter
For extra features: Touch sensor, motion sensor, distance sensor, etc

Step 1: Create LED Strip

To begin with, you want to create an LED strip of an appropriate size. Do this by measuring two different colour long jumper wires and cutting slits in the jumper wires so that the wire is then exposed. Depending on how far you want your LEDs to be from each other, measure the correct length and cut the slits in the appropriate areas. Refer to the picture above.

Step 2: Setup LEDs

Now you want to begin to solder the LEDs. Before you begin to solder the LEDs make sure you test each individual LED to ensure it works (you don't want to realize it doesn't work once you have soldered it on to your LED strip).

Solder all the anodes to one of the jumper wires and all the cathodes to the other jumper wire. Be careful when soldering so you don't solder both legs together!

Step 3: Light Them Up!

Once you are satisfied with your LED strip, you want to get your breadboard and connect the strip of the short legs to GND and the long legs to power with a 220 or 330 ohm resistor (refer to the picture above).

With this project you can also program you LEDs to turn on or off using a motion/touch sensor or even do fun patterns! I used very simple code to light up the LEDs if the touch sensor is touched. My code and the simple circuit can be found below!

Message me if you have any questions! Happy Holidays!