I bought this along with aBTF-LIGHTING AC100-240V to DC12V6A power supply and a BTF-LIGHTING 5050 RGBW LED strip, after lots of research and a certain amount of educated guessing, and that combination worked flawlessly for me out of the box. The remainder of this review assumes you have that specific combination of components.The LEDs come with a cable that connects the pin sockets on the end of the strip to individual wires suitable for insertion into the controller. When inserting each wire, pay attention to the wire color! The order of red and green is switched on the controller relative to the pin order on the LED strip, so you'll need to cross-wire the wires. The colors of the wires in the cable that comes with the LED strip matches the pin order on the strip, so just attach the red wire to the "R" socket on the controller and the green wire to the "G" socket, and you'll be fine (unless you're red-green colorblind, in which case, best of luck!). The controller also comes with two sockets marked V+ (power). Attach the black wire to one of them and leave the other one empty. This advice probably applies to the RGBW controller that has a remote control too, but I can't say for sure.If nothing happens when you plug it in, make sure the plug between the wall socket and the power brick is firmly inserted. It took a fair bit of persuasion for me to get it fully seated.The controller comes with an instruction sheet that assumes you're using a specific third-party Zigbee hub and smart home app, so I mostly ignored it. The only relevant instruction is to press the button on the controller four times in quick succession to make it register itself with your Zigbee hub. Once I did that, it immediately showed up in my name-brand home app, the name of which I will not mention because the company seem to dislike it when people mention using third-party components with their hub, and I want to avoid unnecessary Hue and cry. Suffice it to say it works great with that system, though.Inserting the wires into the individual sockets was a little fiddly and requires a small straight-slot screwdriver of the sort you might get with a glasses kit. I was honestly a little surprised when I turned it on and it all worked, because I couldn't push the wires very far into the sockets. But they stayed in place when I screwed them down, and apparently that's enough. Using the cable that came with the LED strip, I didn't have to strip the wires at all to make that work.I was honestly not expecting the controller to just work on the first try, so I was very pleased when it did!