With this stick of NeoPixel LEDs, Adafruit have crammed 8 of the tiny 5050 (5mm x 5mm) smart RGB LEDs onto a PCB with mounting holes and a chainable design. When using these LED strips, you can use just one microcontroller pin to control as many sticks as you can chain together! Each LED is addressable as the driver chip is inside the LED. Each one has ~18mA constant current drive so the color will be very consistent even if the voltage varies, and no external choke resistors are required making the design slim. Power the whole thing with 5VDC (4-7V works) and you're ready to rock.

The LEDs are 'chainable' by connecting the output of one stick into the input of another - see the photos above where 2 have been soldered together. There is a single data line with a very timing-specific protocol. Since the protocol is very sensitive to timing, it requires a real-time microconroller such as an AVR, Arduino, PIC, mbed, etc. It cannot be used with a Linux-based microcomputer or interpreted microcontroller such as the netduino or Basic Stamp. Adafruit have released a wonderfully-written NeoPixel library for Arduino which supports these pixels! As it requires hand-tuned assembly it is only for AVR cores but others may have ported this chip driver code so please google around. An 8MHz or faster processor is required.

Comes as a single stick with 8 individually addressable RGB LEDs assembled and tested.

Features

• Dimensions: 51.10mm x 10.22mm x 3.19mm
• Weight: 2.57g
• Composed of 8 WS2812B 4-pin chip LEDs.

Useful Links

Datasheet for WS2812

Adafruit NeoPixel UberGuide - Everything you need to know to use NeoPixels

NeoPixel Arduino library