Your LED strip shows the wrong colours
You ask for red and get green. Yellow comes out cyan. White is the only thing that looks right. Nothing is broken — the strip and the controller disagree about which wire is which, and on our lights you can fix it in the app in under a minute.
Confirm it in ten seconds
Before assuming anything, set the strip to pure red in the app — full saturation, not a pastel — and look at what actually comes out.
| You asked for red and got… | What it means |
|---|---|
| Red | Channel order is correct. Your problem is something else. |
| Green or blue | Channel order is swapped. This page is for you. |
| Nothing, but green and blue work | Not an ordering problem — that channel is not being driven. Check the connector. |
| White | All three channels are on together. Usually a connector seated wrong, not ordering. |
A good second check: white. If white looks correct but every individual colour is wrong, that is close to conclusive. White drives all three channels equally, so it looks right no matter what order they are in — which is exactly why people miss this problem for weeks while "the light works fine".
What is actually happening
A standard RGB strip has four contacts: one shared supply and three colour channels. The controller drives those three in a fixed order.
The catch is that the physical order of those pads is not standardised across the industry. Some strips are laid out with red in the second position; others put green there. Both are perfectly normal products. But if your controller drives position two as red while your strip has green wired to position two, every colour you request comes out permuted.
This is why the problem shows up most often when a strip and a controller come from different places — a replacement strip, a longer run bought separately, an extension from another brand. Two good components, mismatched conventions.
It is not a fault and it does not damage anything. The channels are electrically identical; only the labelling differs. Running a mismatched pair does no harm while you sort it out.
The fix, in the app
Rather than making you rewire the connector, our apps let you remap the channels in software. In the app the setting is called Modify Pin Sequence — it is in the settings pop-up, not on the main control screen, which is why most people never find it.
It is available in Lotus Lantern and Magic Lantern. If you are not sure which app runs your light, our app selection guide covers all forty product categories.
That drawing is the useful part. You are not picking an abstract preset like "GRB"; you are telling the controller which colour sits on which physical pin, in the same left-to-right order as the connector in your hand.
- Connect to the light as usual and confirm it responds to brightness — you need a live connection for the change to be saved to the controller.
- Open the settings pop-up from the control screen.
- Choose "Modify Pin Sequence".
- Assign each pin. Three signal pins, three colours, one selection each. The pin order on screen matches the order on the strip header, so you can work along the connector physically rather than guessing at a preset name.
- Save it. The setting is stored on the controller, not just in the phone — it survives closing the app and unplugging the light.
Work it out empirically rather than by reasoning about wiring: hold the strip on pure red, change the red channel setting, and watch. When red produces red, move to green. Two or three attempts usually lands it, and there is no way to get it wrong permanently — you can keep changing it.
If your app has no pin-sequence setting
Not every app in the range includes it, because not every controller needs it. If the option is not in your settings pop-up, you have two choices.
Swap the wires. On a connector-terminated strip, reseat the two offending wires in the connector. On a soldered joint, unsolder and re-solder them the other way round. Note which two need swapping first — from the red test above, if red produces green then red and green are the pair.
Live with it, carefully. If the light spends its life running colour effects rather than specific named colours, a permuted channel order is largely invisible. Whites and warm tones still look correct. This is a legitimate choice for a decorative installation, though it will confuse the next person who works on it.
The related setting: Pixels
On addressable lighting, the same settings pop-up carries a second setting worth knowing about, listed as Pixels — the number of addressable points on the strip.
The controller needs to know how many addressable points are on the strip in order to spread effects across the whole run. Set it too low and effects compress into the first section while the rest sits idle or lags. Set it too high and the effect appears to run off the end of the strip and disappear.
If your colours are correct but chase effects behave strangely — stopping early, running past the end, looking squashed into one part of the run — check this setting before assuming the strip is faulty.
What this is not
- A dead section — if part of the strip is dark while the rest is fine, that is a break in the run, not a channel-order problem.
- Colour drift along a long run — if colour is correct at the controller end and shifts warm toward the far end, that is voltage drop, and remapping channels will not help.
- Dim or washed-out colour everywhere — usually an underpowered supply rather than anything to do with ordering.
Still wrong after remapping?
If you have set the pin sequence, saved it, and red still does not produce red, reconnect to the light and check the setting held. If it reverted, the save did not reach the controller — usually because the connection dropped mid-save. Reconnect and set it again with the light close to the phone.
If it holds but the colours are still wrong, tell us what you asked for and what came out, and we will work through it: contact us.