By popular demand, we now have rugged metal buttons with a full-color NeoPixel LED ring light! These chrome-plated metal buttons are rugged, but certainly not lacking in flair.
This is a 19mm Momentary version of the RGB pushbutton. Simply drill a 19mm hole into any material up to 0.45″ thick and you can fit these in place – there’s even a rubber gasket to keep water out of the enclosure. On the front of the button is a flat metal actuator, surrounded by a plastic RGB LED ring.
To use the NeoPixel Color LED: Power the internal NeoPixels with +5V, ground and a NeoPixel signal line – it’s a lot easier than wiring up 3 separate RGB LED diodes. Best of all, the NeoPixel signal is chainable, so you can light up multiple switches in one panel.
This pushbutton has both normally-open and normally-closed contacts, and unlike our other rugged metal pushbuttons, these come with a detachable 7-wire cable harness to make wiring easy. Follow the datasheet for the wiring pinout.
The switch and LED are electrically separated, so to change the color, use a microcontroller to both read the contact pins and control the NeoPixel.
Adafruit publishes a wide range of writing and video content, including interviews and reporting on the maker market and the wider technology world. Our standards page is intended as a guide to best practices that Adafruit uses, as well as an outline of the ethical standards Adafruit aspires to. While Adafruit is not an independent journalistic institution, Adafruit strives to be a fair, informative, and positive voice within the community – check it out here: adafruit.com/editorialstandards
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.