Adafruit Neo Pixel Jewels 7 x 5050 RGB/RGBW LEDs with Integrated Drivers
- Adafruit 2859, The Adafruit Neo Pixel Addressable LED Jewels have had an upgrade & now feature 7 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 jewel 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 jewel into the data-in of another to control them both from the same microcontroller (MCU). Since the data protocol has strict timing requirements, the jewels are 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 2859 Neo Pixel Jewel LED Module 7 x 5050 RGBW (Natural White 4500K)