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I'm not very well-versed in electrical engineering, so I'd be glad to get some beginner-friendly answers.

I have a device similar to this (source), used for controlling LED strips (through PWM I think):

LED strip controller

The one in the picture has "G D C +" printed on the side towards the LED strip, mine has "G C D +" on it. Weirdly, I can't figure out what the letters stand for - I suppose it's some sort of abbreviations for which connector has what function (e.g. G = "ground"), but what are those? And why are there 4 characters if there are only 3 cables?

Davide Andrea
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Cedric Reichenbach
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  • Your specific device has only 3 wires and so is probably wired for a 3-wire LED strip like ws2812, but 4 wire (SPI, etc) strips also exist which will have data and clock. – user1850479 Nov 21 '22 at 20:44

2 Answers2

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I would assume that G D C + stands for Ground / Data / Clock / +V.

bigclive did a nice tear down on this if you are interested https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOo5lf4tVT4

DrG
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  • + (red) is V+
  • C (green) is data and clock for WS2811, WS2812 etc. protocol
  • G (white in this case, sometimes red+black, sometimes blue) is ground

Some LED strips have separate data and clock wires- they use the more standard (in industry) SPI protocol which allows 10x faster data transfer than the 800kHz WS2812 etc. single-wire protocol.

Typical wiring from here:

enter image description here

Spehro Pefhany
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