What I learned building "comfortable" LED strip lighting

6 points by I built a small workspace lighting setup using LED strips and ended up learning more than I expected. On paper it was simple: stick a strip somewhere, add a diffuser, done. In practice, the stuff that mattered wasn’t the spec sheet-it was power delivery, optics, and human perception. A few notes that surprised me: Power planning > “just buy a bigger PSU.” Long runs behave like distributed loads. Voltage drop shows up as uneven brightness, and on RGB/RGBW it can show up as color shift (“white” gets warmer at the far end). The fix isn’t only wattage-it’s where you feed power, wire gauge, and connector losses. Diffusion is not cosmetic. Without enough distance or diffusion, you get hotspots and glare. A cheap milky diffuser in an aluminum channel gets you most of the way there, but what helped the most was increasing LED-to-diffuser distance (depth of the channel) rather than chasing “premium” diffusers. Indirect beats direct for comfort. Bouncing light off a wall/desk surface looked dimmer on paper but felt more usable and less fatiguing. It also hid the fact that LEDs are point sources. Signal integrity is a separate problem (for addressable). A lot of “flicker” is actually data/ground/reference issues, not power. Short data lines, solid ground, and sometimes level shifting helped more than swapping power supplies. Questions for folks who’ve done larger installs (10-50m) or more “production” setups: Do you design power delivery first or physical layout first? Any favorite diffuser/channel profiles that minimize hotspots without killing too much output? For long addressable runs, what’s your go-to strategy for signal conditioning (buffers, differential, etc.)?

Preview: ~269 words