A while ago I got some leftover color led strips from a friend, but did not have a controller for them, but I did have some available microcontrollers (Pi Pico 2 W, and ESP-32).
The result is a prototype board mounted on a board along with a voltage regulator, connected to USB Power and the LED strips.
The user interface is just a simple IR remote control.
To get here was a long journey, starting with writing some code and laying out the components on a demo board.
The LED strips run at 24V and are ground switched.
Initially I was relying on transistors to keep the 24V of the LED strip away from the 3.3V pins of the Pi Pico. One day one of those transistors failed, and fried the microcontroller.
For the next iteration I added 1000V rectifier diodes between the GPIO Pins and the transistors.
With the addition of the diodes, the gates were showing capacitive effects, mostly color channels not turning off fully, so I had to add high value resistors to drain the gates when the pins turn off.
Eventually I soldered the components onto a prototype board, mounted the parts on a craft board, and wired them together.
code: main.py (gist): https://gist.github.com/sarah-happy/b764c650a840566fd455ef02a1b1f324
The IR library is from: https://github.com/peterhinch/micropython_ir
This has been working for over a year.
Eventually I want to be able to control the lights from my phone. I also want to control them from another device, to set up an automated sunrise and sunset effect, to remind me to go to bed and help with waking up in the morning in the winter.