[VeqIR]

We've used NeoPixels on our bots the last couple of years and found a couple of things that might be helpful to you. We used a the 5V/5A radio voltage regulator for powering the lights from last year and found that the dropout on those can be pretty high (we've measured >6V). On our bot last year, when the batteries were anything less than full, under load, the LED strip would display rainbow colors because the regulator couldn't keep 5V steady. This year, we tried a VRM (5V/2A) as suggested earlier and it was working great, especially since the buck/boost has a much lower drop out.

The Pololu solution was also one we were looking at, but we ended up going with some cheap UBECs from Amazon due to their low dropout and small size:

http://www.amazon.com/NEEWER%C2%AE-U...s=5v%2F5a+ubec

Another thing to mention is that make sure you include the resistor on the signal pin to the first LED. The signal line has some strange input characteristics and exhibits bad overshoot if you don't include the resistor to provide some simple filtering. We ended up frying the first LED in the strip that had already been taped inside of our arm and was an hour job to fix it.

Here's an interesting article on it:

http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?do...&page_number=2