NEW PRODUCTS – Adafruit 40 RGBW NeoPixel Shields – Warm / Natural / Cool White
NEW PRODUCTS – Adafruit 40 RGBW NeoPixel Shields – Warm / Natural / Cool White
Put on your sunglasses before putting this shield onto your ‘duino – 40 eye-blistering RGB and RGBW LEDs adorn the NeoPixel shield for a blast of configurable color. Arranged in a 5×8 matrix, each pixel is individually addressable. Only one pin (Digital #6) is required to control all the LEDs. You can cut a trace and use nearly any other pin if you need some customization.
To make it easy to start, the LEDs are by default powered from the 5V onboard Arduino supply. As long as you aren’t lighting up all the pixels full power white that should be fine. If you want to power the shield with an external power supply, solder in the included terminal block (pro-tip: put it on the bottom of the board so it doesn’t stick up) to wire in an external 4-6VDC power supply – that power supply will also power the Arduino and shield. If you want to use the terminal block to power the shield but keep the Arduino itself on DC or USB power only, cut the center of the solder jumper to the right of the terminal block. There’s a polarity protection FET on the external input in case you wire the power backwards (we would never do that, it was, umm, a friend of ours, yeah that’s it!)
If, say, you need MORE blinky, you can chain these together. For the second shield, connect the DIN connection to the first shield’s DOUT. Also connect a ground pin together and power with 5V. There you go! You can chain as many as you’d like although after 5 or more shields you may run low on RAM if you’re using an UNO.
We include both stacking headers and plain headers. Use whichever you prefer – there isn’t a lot of space left over for the ‘duino pin breakouts so if you want to wire up some other outputs or sensors the stacking headers are good. For a slim sturdy look, solder on the plain headers.
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Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
