This is a nice, interesting, useful article, but the title is garbage.
Step 1: Buy some WS2812B strips.
You're not building the strips. You're building the control infrastructure.
Step 1: Buy some WS2812B strips.
You're not building the strips. You're building the control infrastructure.
Controlling LED strips is not a boring project and it's a wonderful entry into the hobby since it often works with very safe voltages and is happy with cheap components.
But this article is clickbait, and it's probably the most detail-free article imaginable on the subject.
True for constant voltage, resistor limited current ones only. With constant current LED drivers, the voltage is approx 3V per LED. So it adds nicely to unsafe levels, albeit DC.
Another note is the power supplies can be quite unsafe too - esp. the cheap off-brand ones.
You don't wire them in serial anyways. In general if you care about blocks of LEDs at all you don't wire them in serial.
I was just curious to see how one would go about making strips. Order a bunch of wires and hand solder some SMD LEDs? Get a FFC made by a random PCB manufacturer and solder LEDs on those? Make some sort of mould and use one of those odd silver glue connections to an existing wire strip? Order a bare strip and use solder paste and a heat gun or hot air soldering station to solder them on and then dip the whole strip in transparent elastic resin?
Instead of having some curiosity itch scratched it just makes it worse.
Something like "Custom Lighting With Controllable LED Strips" would be better.
BTW: You actually did do nothing more than buying a bunch of strips, I don't see a big technical difference between hue and chinese strips + a chinese hue-bridge except for the soldering (but afaik they also offer connectors for solderless application...). So you might change the title to: "setting up a chineses hue replacement for cheap with soldering" (though I would expect pictures of your soldering then...
You'll get there! :)