It seems to me that you’re going to need two LED strips in the center tube, so as long as your wires are sandwitched between the two strips, they won’t be visible. That might be a little fiddly to do, but you should be able to fit enough wires I think.
Let’s take a look at how many wires you would need through the middle with no optimizations:
- BATT+
- BATT-
- Button1
- Button2
- Blade-
- Blade data
Note, we do NOT need a GND for the buttons, we can just use BATT-, which is the same as GND.
We also do not need a Blade+ since that will just connect to BATT+.
Three of these wires (1), (2) and (5) would need to carry a fair amount of power.
Now let’s see what we can do to reduce it…
First up: “blade data”, if we use a subblade, then we can use the data that comes out of one of the pixel strips to connect to “blade data”, which eliminates (6).
If the pixel strips have good solid copper for + and -, then we might be able to do a similar optimization for “blade-”. The power needed for the blade would be drawn from the end of the two middle pixel strips, which would eliminate (5).
And if we can push enough power thourgh the strips one way, there is no reason we can’t do it the other way. Batt+ is going to have to connect to the (+) side of the two middle strips anyways, so we can connect the + side of the strips to BATT+ on the board on the other side. (through the kill switch.) This eliminates (1).
We have three wires left: BATT- & the two button wires. If we want to get really fancy we could wire up some special codo and resistors to get rid of one of the button wires, but I probably wouldn’t bother. Instead what I would do is to get some 10-lead ribbon cable, use 2 wires for buttons and the other 8 for BATT-. 10 leads of ribbon cable should be only slightly wider than a pixel strip (depending on the strip) so it should sandwhich nicely between the two strips.