These incredibly small surface-mount LEDs are an easy way to add a lot of very tiny (but bright!) colorful dots to your project. They’re mini versions of our digital DotStart strips and matrices with full chainable 2-wire control. They are just mind-bogglingly small. They are a mere 2mm x 2mm (way smaller than APA102-5050-RGB), which makes them pretty darn bitty, so they might be a little cumbersome to hand solder. SMT techniques with solder paste and hot air will work best here.
There are three LEDs inside, red, green, and blue. The RGB LEDs are controlled by a tiny chip that takes a 24-bit color level via the clock and data in and then does all the PWM control for you. So you just ‘set’ the color data once. Like DotStars (and the similar NeoPixels) you can chain them together, the output of one leading into the input of another for near-infinitely long strips.
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 7:30pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
