Do you love 3-wire LED strips? Since you’re browsing Tindie, The answer is most likely yes. However, if these strips have one big weakness, it’s that soldering to the ends can be difficult and unreliable.
As an answer to both problems, Matt at Blinkinlabs presents the “LED strip repair kit,” via the video below. The device is basically an auxiluary contact for the edges of an LED strip, made out of a tiny PCB. To add them to your lighting setup, you solder your strip up to contacts in the middle of the Blinkinlabs PCB, electrically connecting the strip to larger pads at the end.
With this attached, you can then solder your actual power, ground, and control wires up, then coat the now-solid connector section with heat shrink. This forms an excellent bond with the wires, that should stay put under stress much better than wire alone. The large wire solder pads even feature vias to keep the them from pulling off of the PCB substrate. It’s an ingeniously simple solution, that makes you wonder why didn’t I think of that?
