The Adafruit NeoPixel Addressable RGB LED Jewels feature 7 x 5050 RGB LEDs which are individually addressable and can give you 24-bits of colour with 8-bit PWM. These seemingly simple gadgets have triggered an amazing array of creative projects, from watches and compasses to steampunk goggles and more. Each jewel has solder pads for 5V DC and Gnd, plus data-in and data-out, using just 1 x GPIO pin on your microcontroller. Simply feed the data-out from one jewel into the data-in of another to control them both from the same microcontroller (MCU).
Since the data protocol has strict timing requirements, the jewels are best controlled by a real-time microcontroller such as the Arduino rather than a Linux board like the Raspberry Pi. Use an MCU with a clock speed of 8MHz or greater (Arduino is 16MHz).
Adafruit have published a driver library to save you the trouble and let you get on with designing eye catching displays. They have a reputation for the quality of their supporting documentation and you will find their Uberguide to NeoPixels and their Best Practices guides invaluable. In particular the Best Practices guide will help you prolong the life of your NeoPixels and avoid common mistakes. Please make sure you use the NeoPixel RGB library, the RGBW library will give odd results.
- 7-pixel RGB NeoPixel Jewel
- Requires 5V DC power
- Jewels can be daisy-chained together
- Dimensions 23mm diameter x 2mm (0.9 x 0.1in.)
- Adafruit part no.: 2226
*Customers looking to resell on eBay or Amazon should contact Adafruit directly.
| Layout |
Ring |
| No. of LEDs |
7 |
| Shape |
Ring |
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