The rigid strips are wired: red +12v, green -ground, blue - data
You hook red and green to your power supply and hook the controller gnd and data1 to the green and blue respectively. Power does not flow through the unit.
Also, it had no problem driving two strips off of the same data connector. The aligator clips I was using tohook things up got pretty hot when I had two sets of four rigid strips running in parallel...
RM