Been playing some more.
Here's a pic of the controllers I am using. I will be using one per side. The remotes use the same IR codes, so I only need one.
This is known as the IR Remote Controller 44 Keys for RGB Strip. The power input is 12V DC, and uses a 5.5mm barrel connector. At the bottom of the pic above you can see the IR receiver, and the standard 4 pin connector. This controller matched up with the BRG ordering of colors that the LED strip uses. Here's a pic of the corresponding connector on the RBG strip.
My project today was to wire in the additional 5+ feet of extra strips needed to light up the 21' of pontoon log on my boat. I cut the 5+ foot lengths from the ends of the 5M strip so the factory end connectors were in place. And just for the heck of it, plugged the 5' length in series with a 5M strip and the controller. This combined length of LED strip was out of spec for the controller, so I was not greatly surprised to find that although both sections lit up, the 5' section was notieable dimmer than the 5M section, so an inline amplifier is required. The inline amplifiers I acquired from superbright LEDs do not have connectors on the ends so I cut the factory connectors and hard wired the LED amplifiers as shown below.
The inline amplifier requires a12V power connection in addition to the 4 wire LED connection. The amplifier worked well, if anything the 5' strip appears ever so slightly brighter than the 5M strip connected directly to the controller. Color changes, fades, etc appear in perfect sync between 5M and 5' strips. I can't go much further with the perimeter lighting without the boat (which is in storage far, far away) but as I had almost 6' of RGB LED strip, I bought another controller and continued playing.
This controller is different from the 44 key IR controllers in a number of ways. First, it is RF rather than IR. With RF, placement of the controller is much more flexible as line of sight to an IR receiver is not required. Second, this controller has a 12 amp output opposed to the 6 amp output of the 44 key IR controller, so it should be able to power two 5M 300 LED SMD 5050 strips without amplifiers. Lastly, it has music sound sensitive modes that change LED color with the rythm and vary brightness with the volume of the music. The controller does this via a bulit in mic with a sensitivey adjustment,or by a mono headphone jack audio input option. I wired up a strip remnant, attached it to this controller via screw type connectors and tested it out. One neat thing, is that the controller remembers the last mode selected, and the controller turns on this mode when power is resumed. So a switch at the helm can be used to turn on/off the strips without use of the remote. Very amusing. I plan to place several remnant LED strip sections around the interior of the pontoon just for fun.
