Single Color Strip Lighting | Elemental LED Academy
What is the difference between 3528 LEDs and 5050 LEDs |SMD 5050 SMD 3528
The 5050 led strips I bought have three emitters in each chip. Three chips are wired in series with a 150 ohm resistor for each leg of 3 emitters. The 3 series strings are tied together at each end. Since each white led drops around 3.3 volts, the resistors drop whatever is left past about 10 volts. To me, the simplicity of a chip resistor is well worth the fraction of power lost vs running some kind of current controller that has a bad reputation of sensitive and unreliable operation. These things are not complex, so they are much less likely to break than something much like a computer power supply.
