How to make your own USB powered LED lights

Since upstream USB connectors can supply 5V of DC power to downstream devices, we can use USB connectors to power LED lights.

While there are many USB powered lighting options available in the market, making your own gives you more flexibility in the form factor.

With this in mind, let's look at how we can make our own USB powered LED lights.

Parts for making the USB powered LED lights

Since we want more flexibility in the form factor of our own USB powered LED lights, we can choose a SMD2835 light strip as the lighting component.

In addition to that, we can get a 2 conductor cable to link the LED light strip with a USB 2.0 type A pin plug.

Tools for making the USB powered LED lights

Apart from the parts for making the USB powered LED lights, here are some tools for building your lights:

Steps to building your USB powered LED lights

Once you have procured the parts of making your own lights, you can proceed with building your lights.

1. Cut a portion of LED light strip for your lights

First, cut a portion of LED light strip from the coil. You can choose to cut along the solder pads that separate the LED chips.

Where to cut KXZM USB LED Strip Light

In order to have good spacing for soldering, make sure that you leave equal spacing between the severed strips.

2. Cut a good portion of 2 conductor cable to connect the LED light strip to power source

Next, cut out a good portion of 2 conductor cable to connect the LED light strip to power source.

Once you had cut out the needed cable, strip out the wires at both ends for soldering.

3. Solder cable to LED light strip

At this point in time, you are ready to solder the cable to the LED light strip.

In order to have an easier time soldering, you can tape them to the surface.

LED light strip and wire tapped to surface before soldering

After that, apply sufficient soldering wire and solder the cables to the respective soldering pad on the LED strip.

LED light strip and wire tapped to surface after soldering

As shown above, we had soldered the red wire to solder pad labelled + and the black wire to solder pad labelled -.

4. Solder cable to USB 2.0 type A pin plug

At this point in time, we can solder the cable to our USB 2.0 type A pin plug.

Since we had connected the red wire to + and black wire to -, we can solder the cable without the use of a multimeter.

cable soldered to USB type A male pin plug

When you are done with the soldering, cover up the USB 2.0 type A pin plug with the other side of the plastic cover.

USB type A pin plug covered up

After that, you will be able to light up your LED lights by connecting it to a USB power adapter.

About Clivant

Clivant a.k.a Chai Heng enjoys composing software and building systems to serve people. He owns techcoil.com and hopes that whatever he had written and built so far had benefited people. All views expressed belongs to him and are not representative of the company that he works/worked for.