Led Tape Control

[DonRotolo]

OK, first of all be absolutely certain that your lights are not too bright. No sense in blinding anyone...

An RGB strip light is really intended for display of "any" color, by finely varying the intensity of the three primary colors using "pulse width modulation" - but this is a DIFFERENT PWM than what is used to control Jaguars and servos. The PWM outputs of the Sidecar won't work for you.

In this case, you just want to display 3 colors (Red, White, Blue). Why not run to Radio Shack and buy an LED in each color and just connect those? Lighter, cheaper, simpler to implement. Just be sure to use a dropping resistor to bring the 12 volts down into the LEDs range - the package or an Internet resource should help you there.

Controlling would be via a Spike, or you can verify that the rules allow a Digital Output from the DSC to be connected to an LED, because that would be even simpler.

For that matter, you can even use a Spike as the indicator: It shows Red, Yellow and Green. But sometimes your alliance partner might not recognize that you're trying to signal them if-you-know-what-I-mean.

Good luck, let us know what you decide.