That is another way. Having a shift register allows you to have quite a lot of strips connected to your chip, for the “cost” of three pins in total, more or less regardless of how many different strips you want to drive.
If you only want to drive one strip, though, a suitable transistor/MOSFET is a better choice, as you can adapt the schematics to your power requirements.
And make sure you connect the mosfet the right way so it doesn’t “kinda” work and make you think your code is bad. Not that anyone has ever done that ever.
Thankfully it was during my “let’s see if my code works so far” phase as I learned LESs so I only had a dozen connected. I spent a looonnnggg time trying to figure out why my button was turning the LEDs on full brightness instead of fading on. No idea if I fried it, once I figured it out I replaced it with one of the other 50 I ordered (and haven’t touched since)
That is another way. Having a shift register allows you to have quite a lot of strips connected to your chip, for the “cost” of three pins in total, more or less regardless of how many different strips you want to drive.
If you only want to drive one strip, though, a suitable transistor/MOSFET is a better choice, as you can adapt the schematics to your power requirements.
And make sure you connect the mosfet the right way so it doesn’t “kinda” work and make you think your code is bad. Not that anyone has ever done that ever.
With a 30A mosfet under load, you’ll soon notice, I’m sure.
Thankfully it was during my “let’s see if my code works so far” phase as I learned LESs so I only had a dozen connected. I spent a looonnnggg time trying to figure out why my button was turning the LEDs on full brightness instead of fading on. No idea if I fried it, once I figured it out I replaced it with one of the other 50 I ordered (and haven’t touched since)