These are the smallest NeoPixel breakouts around! Tiny, bright RGB+White pixels to your project. These little PCBs are only 9.1mm x 9.1mm and have two sets of three pads on the back for soldering wires. These ultra-bright LEDs have a constant-current driver cooked right into the LED package! The pixels are chainable – so you only need 1 pin/wire to control as many LEDs as you like.
These pixels have full 32-bit color ability (24 bits RGB and then 8 bits of white) with PWM taken care of by the controller chip. Since the LED is so bright, you need less current/power to get the effects you want. The driver is constant current so it’s OK if your battery power changes or fluctuates a little.
The NeoPixel is ‘split’, one half is the RGB you know and love, the other half is a white LED with a yellow phosphor. Unlit, it resembles a school bus. Lit up these are insanely bright (like ow my eye hurts) and can be controlled with 8-bit PWM per channel (8 x 4 channels = 32-bit color overall). Great for adding lots of colorful + warm white dots to your project!
Note these are RGBW and so you will have to make sure your NeoPixel controller is set up for RGBW rather than the standard/default RGB!
Each pixel draws as much as ~70mA (all four RGBW LEDs on for full brightness white). An Arduino can drive up to 350 pixels at 30 FPS (it will run out of RAM after that). Using ribbon cable you can string these up to 6″ apart (after that, you might get power droops and data corruption)
Each order comes with 10 individually controllable pixel buttons.
We have a tutorial showing wiring, power usage calculations, example code for usage, etc. for NeoPixel. Please check it out! Please note you will need a NeoPixel library with RGBW support which is not always available. If you try to control these with a plain ‘RGB’ NeoPixel library, you’ll get very weird results. Our Adafruit NeoPixel library does support RGBW but if you’re using something else, just be aware that it might require some hacking. Also, the Blue LED element is close to the white phosphor and the light bleeds into it, so blue light will have a mix of white as well.
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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.
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