Hi,
I’ve been running an addressable led strip off an Arduino, mostly 1 led at a time, occasionally up to 30 on lowest brightness, the current draw seems not to bother it.
I’m half tempted to try that with the Daisy Seed, but would prefer to hijack the +5 directly from the USB I’m using to power it. Is there some adapter or something I can sandwich between the USB cable and the Daisy which will allow me to pull current from the USB cable? I’m not too keen to cut cables if I can avoid it.
Hello 
I’m sorry in advance if I misinterpreted your question!
I think a setup like this should work for getting 5V and ground separately from a USB power source:
Then, you can connect the 5V to the Daisy’s VIN pin as well as the addressable LED’s 5V pin. You may be able to just use 3.3 volt for data (even if the Daisy is powered via 5V, the output will still be 3.3 volt), but I recommend searching around the internet for confirmation (or giving it a try!).
Just a heads up that I put that setup together a while back so I forgot if I ended up actually putting it together and testing it.
Is your USB power from the laptop by the way? If so, it’s not ideal since it’s noisy.
That sounds like a good idea, although now I think about it, a usb cable cut up and repurposed to just carry 5V from a USB battery bank to the pins on a Daisy Seed doesn’t seem like such an awful hack. Not sure why I thought of it that way now…