The Adafruit 16x9 Charlieplexed PWM LED Matrix Drivers are pin compatible with the Adafruit Charlieplexed LED Matrix boards. This neat combo lets you drive 144 x 0603 individually addressable surface mount LEDs using just 2 x I2C signals (CLK and DAT). And because the boards support 8-bit PWM, each LED can be dimmed, which is rare for single colour LED matrix boards and allows a whole range of interesting animated effects. Adafruit have a free tutorial that also shows you how to download their driver software which is compatible with their ADAFRUIT_GFX graphics library. You'll be drawing lines, circles, text and small bitmaps in no time and with minimal effort.
The core chip is the IS31FL3731 which handles all the switching and PWM for you. It also has 8 x frame buffers you can write to and then switch between to create even more animation effects. Each board can be set to 1 of 4 I2C addresses so that 4 x boards can share a single bus for a total of 576 addressable, dimmable LEDs. They're compatible with both 3 and 5V logic to suit whatever microcontroller you prefer for your project.
- LED Matrix driver
- Individually dimmable LEDs using 8-bit PWM
- 8-frame memory for animations
- 3 and 5V logic compatible
- Dimensions 2.4 x 43.3 x 27.8mm (1.7 x 1.1 x 0.09in.)
- Adafruit part no.: 2946
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