LED Strips, what's the difference? WS2811, WS2812B, 2812Eco, WS2813, WS2815, SK6812, SK9822.

today on the hookup i'm going to perform tests on all of the most popular types of individually addressable led strips we're going to talk about their technical specifications and then i'm going to help you figure out which one

is the best for your project first of all if you're looking for the one best led strip i unfortunately can't give you a single answer the actual answer is that there are many factors to

consider and each application will likely have one type of strip that would be best suited for it the purpose of this video is to help you determine what variety of individually addressable led

strip will work best based on the parameters of your project for easy viewing purposes i've linked the chart down in the video description with the results of my tests and a quick reference sheet for choosing led strip

variety before we get into it i want to give a huge thanks to btf lighting for providing me with one of each type of their led strips to perform my tests they're a great vendor that i've used at

least a dozen times and they have both an amazon and an aliexpress store you should check out the links down in the description to see their huge led selection let's start by getting a

physical look at each strip type in order to keep my tests as standardized as possible each strip has the same led density and waterproofing type

specifically these are all 150 leds per 5 meters and the ip65 silicon coated variety but there are significantly more varieties to choose from when you select

your led strips you're typically going to get to select a few options the first will be the color of the flexible pcb that the chips are mounted on you can usually choose between black and white

and it really makes no difference second is the pixel density or how many leds are in a single meter i tend to use the 30 leds per meter variety because it makes power requirements a little bit

more manageable but they come in a variety of densities all the way up to 144 leds per meter third you'll need to choose what type of waterproofing you want for your project as i said before the ones that i'm

testing are ip65 which means that they're coated with a flexible clear silicon to keep water and dust out but they aren't rated to be submerged in water in my experience they are both

splash proof and rain proof if you require more waterproofing you can choose the ip67 version that come in sealed silicon sleeves but keep in mind that they do get a bit annoying if you

need to cut the strips to length of course if your project is indoors then you won't need any waterproofing and that option is available as well the last choice you need to make is the specific chip that will drive your

individually addressable leds this chip is where each of the strips gets their name and i'll specifically be working with these seven chip types today these led strips all work with the same basic

principle data is sent down a single wire where it's then read by a small microcontroller chip that produces a pulse width modulated signal that controls the brightness of each channel

of an led chip that contains a red segment a green segment and a blue segment each segment can have 256 levels of brightness which results in 256 to the

third power different colors that can be produced if you see the term 5050 led on the product pages that just refers to the size of the led chip not necessarily the type of led or any other components

that may be integrated into it as for their power draw specifications there are hundreds of forum posts linking to the led data sheets and giving generalized rules for calculating current draw but i couldn't find much in

the way of actual testing and comparison so for this video i've tested each of the led strips by first measuring the current draw of the strip with all the leds off then the current draw of a single

channel of one pixel then all the channels of one pixel a single channel of all the pixels and then the overall current draw for the entire strip with every channel at

maximum brightness i also evaluated the loss of color accuracy due to voltage drop on each strip type we're going to begin testing with the oldest model of leds that i tested

the ws2811s a 12v strip shines when you want to power these strips over large distances voltage drop is the term used to describe the difference in voltage at

the beginning of a wire run and at the end of that wire run voltage drop is a result of the actual wire or in this case the copper traces on the led strip contributing a significant amount of

electrical resistance if your output is 5 volts and you have 2.5 volts of drop over 30 feet that means you'll only have 50 percent of your voltage left over and that means the last leds are only going

to receive 2.5 volts in total which is not necessarily enough to accurately produce the colors that you selected if you instead start with 12 volts and have that same 2.5 volt drop that only

represents a 21 change in voltage and the remaining nine and a half volts will produce significantly more accurate colors than that 5 volt strip did you can see the difference in color accuracy

between the 12 volt ws 2811s and the 5 volt ws2812b here when they're both outputting 100 brightness for the whole strip the fix for this is to apply power at both ends

of the led strip in a method that's called power injection but in cases where frequent power injection isn't possible 12 volt strips like the ws2811 should typically be favored most of the

time ws2811 strips are the least expensive but they do come with a few downsides most importantly the cheapest versions of the ws2811 are not truly

individually addressable typically a ws2811 strip has a single microcontroller that actually powers three led pixels or a total of nine channels this means that it isn't truly

possible to control each led but instead each pixel in your code represents a group of three led chips in my tests the ws2811s had one of the

highest power usages when no leds were lit drawing 1.27 watts of power for their microcontrollers and lighting the entire strip with pure white pulled a

total of 1.64 amps which is about 19.68 watts at full brightness you can also see that the color accuracy is really good throughout the entire five meter strip even without any power injection

which as i mentioned before is a huge advantage of the 12 volt strip over the 5 volt strip as for use case the ws strips should be considered when the cost is an important factor or when

power injection can't be easily accomplished but not necessarily if you need to control each pixel individually next up on the list is by far the most common type of led strip the

ws-2812b which unlike the ws2811 has the controller chip embedded directly in the led package the ws2812b only comes in five volt

variety so it's going to need more power injection than the ws-2811 12-volt strip but the smaller components means less material is required to produce the strip and theoretically cost should be

lower for the strips where each led can be controlled individually in my test the ws-2812b consumed half as much power as the ws2811s when no leds were lit but

as expected the power consumption for the leds was almost exactly the same at about 60 milliwatts per channel and the full strip consumed only 13.6 watts which is about 6 watts less than the

ws2811s i also have another new variety of ws2812bs called the eco in my test the ecoversion did have the lowest baseline power

consumption needing only 56 milliwatts with no leds lit being 5 volt strips both types really struggled to reproduce accurate colors near the end of the strip due to voltage drop with the eco

version performing slightly worse than the non-eco version in general i use ws2812b strips as my general purpose led strips they're relatively cheap they come in a huge variety of pixel

densities waterproofing types and strip colors and they're compatible with basically every library that's meant to control individually addressable leds so what would cause an led strip to be

incompatible with a library these libraries control something that's called chip timing which is the rate at which the leds expect new data in strips that contain the sk9822

chip timing is handled a bit differently instead of having a hard-coded timing that your microcontroller needs to adhere to it includes another wire that's called the clock pin this clock pin dictates

the rate of data transfer between the microcontroller and the chip it not only means that the microcontroller can be pushed to its maximum potential by speeding up the rate of the data transfer more than the

ws2811 or 2812bs would allow but it also allows for the data transfer to be slowed down if frames per second aren't that important and the microcontroller has a significant secondary workload the

sk9822 chips had the highest idle power consumption of any of the five volt strips but had comparable power consumption numbers for lighting the entire strip up with full white one important thing to note was the

significantly worse color accuracy due to voltage drop in these trips when you inject power into a 2812b it's generally enough to power each end of a

five meter strip but in the sk 9822 strips i would suggest injecting power every two and a half meters to maintain color accuracy the sk9822 also costs a little bit more

than the 2812b and it requires an additional conductor for the clock pin but in situations where errors and animations are unacceptable and data accuracy is the most important

consideration the sk-9822 strips are well worth the increase in price the other downfall to serial communication is that since all the data is being passed over a single wire any break in

the chain will cause the entire strip after that to fail the ws2813 strips are made to address this downfall on the

ws2813 there are two different data lines labeled di and bi meaning data in and backup in this allows the strip to continue functioning in the event of a dead pixel

because the bi channel will act as a pass-through as long as two consecutive leds don't fail the rest of the led strip should continue to function this makes the ws-13 strips ideal for

situations where the strips can't be accessed for repair like for instance if you're going to encase them in epoxy unfortunately like the

sk9822 the ws2813 strips performed very poorly in terms of color accuracy they exhibited noticeable yellowing after about 45 pixels at full brightness aside from that the power consumption was

predictably less given the increased internal resistance and it required only 12.15 watts for the entire strip when lit at full brightness i'd expect this number would go up

significantly with more power injection points if you want a backup data channel without the voltage drop issues then the ws2815 may be the answer the ws2815 is a

12 volt strip and as you can see there is no significant depreciation in color rendering throughout the entire strip even at full brightness the trade-off is price and power consumption you can see

that there's some really odd behavior in the ws 2815 when it comes to current draw basically a single pixel draws the exact same amount of current at 50 red as it

does at 50 white even though the white consists of the red green and blue pixels an awesome commenter in another one of my videos explain why but the cliffs notes is that each channel is powered in

series instead of in parallel and if only a single channel is wanted the other two are then shorted out by a transistor resistor combo to keep the current constant the ws 2815 has both

the highest idle power consumption at 3.52 watts and the highest full white power consumption at 20.18 watts per 150 leds that being said they're going to be

extremely reliable due to the backup channel and they are great at reproducing the correct colors despite voltage drop in the strip the ws2815 seemed pretty great but i've saved my

favorite led variety for last the sk 6812 is very similar to the ws2812b and then it requires only 5 volts it has an embedded microcontroller and it lacks

a backup channel but the sk6812 has the ability to control an additional channel of leds that's used for controlling a large white segment on the 5050 led

package normally rgb strips produce white by turning the red green and blue channels onto the same percentage which produces a slightly blue or purple light

by having a dedicated white channel on the led you can produce a familiar true white light in either warm white neutral white or cool white varieties it's true that it does make the programming a

little more complicated since you're sending four channels instead of three but the results are well worth it anytime i'm using led strips in place of normal light bulbs i always opt for the

rgbw variety for applications like outdoor holiday leds it's much less important since i want those to make crazy patterns prefer adding subtle black lighting while still being able to

get fancy from time to time the sk 6812 rgbw strips are absolutely the best in my test the 6812s had moderately high

power consumption at idle of 0.83 watts and 14.4 watts when fully lit you can also see that they had a significant amount of yellowing around led 90 but that's not really a valid test since you

wouldn't produce white light by turning on the r g and b strips you'd actually just use the white channel and while the white channel draws more current than any other single channel lighting the

whole strip with white results in only 10 watts of power draw the lowest white power consumption of any of the strips that i tested with the added benefit of nearly perfect color accuracy throughout

the entire strip without power injection so as you can see there's not really a one size fits all led strip but instead they all have specific strengths and weaknesses

if i was forced to pick a single led strip type to use in all of my projects i would absolutely choose the sk 6812 rgbw strips either in warm white or cool

white variety depending on my use case maybe in the future there's going to be a 12 volt rgbw strip with backup data but for now the sk6812 is my go-to strip

thank you to all of my awesome patrons over at patreon for your continued support of my channel if you'd like to support my channel please check out the links down in the description if you enjoyed this video please consider

subscribing and as always thanks for watching the hookup