LED Light Bar - drunken ebay purchase

[boney2]

I drunkenly bought a 4ft LED light bar on ebay. It supposedly lights up in different colours.
Now that it has arrived, I have no idea how I am supposed to connect it - and I suspect it may be intended for commercial use.

I don't really know what I ultimately intend to do with it - but now that I have it, I'd like to at least see it working.

It doesn't appear to have any power specifications written on it. It just has a cable that contains 4 wires: blue, brown, black and white.

Is it feasible that I could get this working with relative ease?

 

[SparkyChick]

The connections could be power (a positive and negative) and some data connection (possibly data in/data out). There are some LEDs that contain controller chips and they are individually addressable and their current display is set by pumping data into them via a serial interface. This would be my thought if it's an RGB device capable of displaying lots of different colours at the same time (i.e. multiple segments each with their own colour).

If it's only capable of displaying a single colour across the entire strip, then I'd be inclined to think the connections are some kind of common (can be positive or negative) and then one conductor each for red, green and blue.

If you have a manufacturer/model number you may be able to find the details on-line.

 

[Dartlec]

Well it makes for a good story at least!

Is there any identification on it at all? There is normally something somewhere that can help with the right google search.

From the look of the connector, it may well be something that is plugged into a central adapter, perhaps with several bars fed from the same control unit?

The different wires may be Red, Green, Blue, and Plus, which is a relatively common way of running LED strips.

It might just need a suitable driver to feed the cables.

However, the cables look a lot thicker than the normal ones feeding LEDs, so it's also possible that it is a commercial specialist fitting - perhaps used in stage lighting, or discos or similar?

Hopefully someone will recognise it or have a better clue as to how to test if it works.

 

[boney2]

Thanks for the replies.
The light bar itself has absolutely nothing written on it. The guy I bought it from claimed it was made by a company called ACDC. He seemed even more clueless than me though so I don't know how helpful that is.

 

[James]

With nothing to go on, I would try putting 5v across black (-ve) and each of the others in turn and see what lights up.

 

[littlespark]

Could you link to the sale page on eBay? We can maybe find some details one it from there..


This could be a thread in itself : “drunken eBay purchases”