Recently, I purchased a brand new LED light strip to install in my vehicle. I thought it would look really cool to have some multicolored LED illumination, but there was one problem. These days, most LED light strips come with 5 volt USB plugs at the end, which is becoming the new norm. However, my vehicle has more USB ports than I expected, including two near my headphones and another for my smartphone. I quickly realized that I needed to extend the cord to make it fit properly.
If you’re in the same situation, you might be wondering how to extend a USB cable. While you could create your own voltage regulator, that’s not something most people want to do. Instead, I found a much easier solution – splicing the USB cable. Splicing allows me to use the USB plug in the factory location and extend the cord as needed.
When you open up the USB cord, you’ll see a red lead, which is the positive 5 volt DC wire, and a black lead, which is the ground wire. If this were a standard USB, you would also find a pair of white and green leads, which are the data to and from Rx and Tx. However, since this is just a light, it’s only designed to take voltage into the transformer and remote sensor to control the power to the light.
To extend the cable, I used some free twisted wire, which I twisted together with the red and black leads from the USB cord. I then added some heat-shrink and solder to tape it up, and that’s it! This simple solution allowed me to extend the cord to fit my vehicle needs and eliminated my fear of running into the regulator.
It’s becoming more common to have USB cords in modern vehicles, and LED light strips are no exception. With a little bit of knowledge and some simple tools, you can easily splice a USB cable to extend your LED light strip.