LED Strip help please.

[Herbblood]

Hi.
We got the LED light strip, 8.2ft, 80 LEDs (am-2640) from Andymark and have run into problems using it. When we first wired it up per the diagram given and used the lightsaber code from andymark and got it working. But then when we tried to run our own code so that the strip would light up at the same time it didn't work. And now the lightsaber code won't work either. When we hit the reset button on the arduino only the first LED lights up blue and will increase in intensity after a certain period of time.
This is the second LED strip we've tried to get to work and have no clue what is wrong, so if anyone could please help it would be much apreciated.

~Herbblood