Adafruit Neo Pixel Addressable 5050 LED Rings RGBW
- Adafruit 2855, The popular Adafruit Neo Pixel Addressable LED Rings have had an upgrade & now feature 16 x 5050 RGB + Natural White (4500K) LEDs. The white LEDs are very intense & add a new dimension to your Neo Pixel projects, with the 8-bit PWM you get 32-bits of colour. These seemingly simple gadgets have triggered an amazing array of creative projects, from watches & compasses to steampunk goggles & more. Each ring has solder pads for 5V DC & Gnd, plus data in & data out, using just 1 x GPIO pin on your microcontroller. Simply feed the data out from one ring into the data in of another to control them both from the same microcontroller (MCU). Since the data protocol has strict timing requirements, the ring is best controlled by a real-time microcontroller such as the Arduino rather than a Linux board like the Raspberry Pi. Use an MCU with a clock speed of 8 M Hz or greater (Arduino is 16 M Hz). Adafruit have published a driver library to save you the trouble & let you get on with designing eye catching displays. They have a reputation for the quality of their supporting documentation & you will find their Uberguide to Neo Pixels & their Best Practices guides invaluable. In particular the Best Practices guide will help you prolong the life of your Neo Pixels & avoid common mistakes. Please make sure you use the Neo Pixel RGBW library, the RGB library will give odd results. Adafruit 2855 Neo Pixel Addressable LED Ring 16 x 5050 RGBW (Natural White 4500K)