Attaching the light strip to the Raspberry Pi

Before we can write code to display color sequences on our LEDs, we need to wire them to our Raspberry Pi and attach them to our robot. After we have finished this section, the robot block diagram will look like the following:

The robot block diagram with the LED strip

Logic levels

To attach an RGB LED strip to the Pi, we need to be aware that the Raspberry Pi GPIO pins operate at 3.3V, and the majority of these lights operate with logic at 5V. This logic level voltage applies to the high digital level. If we try to drive these directly from the Pi, at too low a voltage, the results may be inconsistent at best. If we are signalling back to the Pi, too high a voltage will damage...