Power supply wiring: does this look right?

Hi there,

I have 5m of APA102 60led/m leds and a 5V 30A power supply that í'm trying to wire up but I'm a little confused as to how to go about it. This is all a bit new to me so bear with me.

Below is how things are currently wired up; the 5 led strip pieces each have their own 5V connection to the V+ on the power supply, DI, CI and GND are connected between the strips.

I can't seem to get my LEDs to light up though.

Do I need to connect the GND end of each of the led strips with V- on the power supply? Am I missing something else?

Any help is appreciated!

It's an original Raspberry Pi, model B. SSH is enabled, the other two I'm not sure, the leds did light up when I was testing them before cutting, and I could control them with the app so I assume that's ok.

I was thinking that I might need to connect the 5V ends of the strips to the V+ on the power supply as well?

The power supply is 5v 30A so 150W peak. Connections are soldered. I did test by removing the power supply, but what is supposed to happen then? If I understand correctly the APA102 leds need the data connection to give instructions on which leds to turn on, if there is no data being sent none of them will turn on right?

I removed the Clock and Data connections from the strip and powered on the power supply but nothing happens.

I decided to resolder the entire thing so that it is one continuous strip (as in the tutorial here). That made no difference but I did notice something strange: I had my soldering iron plugged into the same power brick as the Pi and when I turned the soldering iron off, some LEDs lit up! After powering the soldering iron on and off a few times all LEDS light up, so I don't think power is the issue, it is more the driving of the LEDs that's failing...

I'm currently running Openelec on the Pi, but I don't plan to use it since I have and nvidia Shield TV that does all the heavy lifting. The RPi will only be used to drive the leds using a usb grabber and HDMI splitter.

My soldering iron is really a soldering station, like this, but i guess the same principle applies.

But anyway, I installed Raspbian Lite, enabled SSH and the SPI kernel module, installed Hyperion and still nothing. So I installed wiringPi and PiGPIO to test the GPIO pins and I'm seeing a lot of failures:

The main 8 GPIO pins  0: 7:
--> Pin 0 failure. Expected 1, got 0
--> Pin 1 failure. Expected 1, got 0
--> Pin 2 failure. Expected 1, got 0
--> Pin 3 failure. Expected 1, got 0
--> Pin 4 failure. Expected 1, got 0
--> Pin 5 failure. Expected 1, got 0
--> Pin 6 failure. Expected 1, got 0
Pin 7 failure - expected 0, got 1
8 faults detected
                The 5 SPI pins 10:14:
--> Pin 12 failure. Expected 1, got 0
--> Pin 13 failure. Expected 1, got 0
--> Pin 14 failure. Expected 1, got 0
Pin 10 failure - expected 0, got 1
Pin 11 failure - expected 0, got 1
5 faults detected
               The serial pins 15:16:
--> Pin 15 failure. Expected 1, got 0
--> Pin 16 failure. Expected 1, got 0
2 faults detected
                  The I2C pins  8: 9:  OK




Faults detected! Output of 'readall':
+-----+-----+---------+------+---+-Model B1-+---+------+---------+-----+-----+
| BCM | wPi |   Name  | Mode | V | Physical | V | Mode | Name    | wPi | BCM |
+-----+-----+---------+------+---+----++----+---+------+---------+-----+-----+
|     |     |    3.3v |      |   |  1 || 2  |   |      | 5v      |     |     |
|   2 |   8 |   SDA.1 |   IN | 1 |  3 || 4  |   |      | 5v      |     |     |
|   3 |   9 |   SCL.1 |   IN | 1 |  5 || 6  |   |      | 0v      |     |     |
|   4 |   7 | GPIO. 7 |   IN | 1 |  7 || 8  | 0 | IN   | TxD     | 15  | 14  |
|     |     |      0v |      |   |  9 || 10 | 0 | IN   | RxD     | 16  | 15  |
|  17 |   0 | GPIO. 0 |   IN | 0 | 11 || 12 | 0 | IN   | GPIO. 1 | 1   | 18  |
|  27 |   2 | GPIO. 2 |   IN | 0 | 13 || 14 |   |      | 0v      |     |     |
|  22 |   3 | GPIO. 3 |   IN | 0 | 15 || 16 | 0 | IN   | GPIO. 4 | 4   | 23  |
|     |     |    3.3v |      |   | 17 || 18 | 0 | IN   | GPIO. 5 | 5   | 24  |
|  10 |  12 |    MOSI |   IN | 0 | 19 || 20 |   |      | 0v      |     |     |
|   9 |  13 |    MISO |   IN | 0 | 21 || 22 | 0 | IN   | GPIO. 6 | 6   | 25  |
|  11 |  14 |    SCLK |   IN | 0 | 23 || 24 | 1 | IN   | CE0     | 10  | 8   |
|     |     |      0v |      |   | 25 || 26 | 1 | IN   | CE1     | 11  | 7   |
+-----+-----+---------+------+---+----++----+---+------+---------+-----+-----+
| BCM | wPi |   Name  | Mode | V | Physical | V | Mode | Name    | wPi | BCM |
+-----+-----+---------+------+---+-Model B1-+---+------+---------+-----+-----+

So I guess I must've damaged the GPIO controller

Time to look for a new Pi I guess...

I ended up going with a RPi Zero. It works!

At first I was driving the clock and data lines with cables that were a bit too long, the signal would get distorted, but after moving the Pi Zero to the back of the tv and using shorter wires everything is ok