mosfet

I bought a few weeks ago some quite cheap 5 meters RGB LED strips (60 LEDs per meter) on eBay. My intent is to drive them with a custom Arduino receiving commands over some XBees. I was in need of MOSFETs in order to drive the 3 RGB channels, and again found some cheap ones on eBay I received a few days ago. Today was a good opportunity for doing some basic tests. My first step was to control the color of the RGB LED Strip with the help of the MOSFETs and an Arduino. Before your read the rest of this blog post, you should read Adafruit tutorial on RGB LED Strips and Bildr tutorial on MOSFETs. I mostly did what Adafruit tutorial explains, except I added 10kΩ resistors, between each control/gate pins and ground (so 3 resistors for a RGB strip), in order to force the signal to LOW until the Arduino kicks in! »