RGB Smart NeoPixel (Pack of 4)

Breadboard-friendly RGB Smart NeoPixel (Pack of 4)

This Adafruit’s Breadboard-friendly RGB Smart NeoPixel (Pack of 4) allows you to enrich your project with tiny and bright RGB pixels in a very simple way.

Adafruit adopted the same technology as with their Flora NeoPixels and made them cleverly and absolutely breadboard friendly. On each side there are two handy rows of 3 x 0.1″ spaced header. This makes soldering, chaining and breadboarding very easy.

These LEDs are ultra-bright besides having a constant-current driver just inside the LED package. The pixels are chainable, only 1 pin/wire is necessary to control any number of LEDs you want.

A full 24-bit colour ability is another quality of these Pixels while the controller chip takes care of the PWM (pulse-width modulation). As the LED is extremely bright, you can get all the effects you want with less current/power. The driver is characterized by constant current so, if your battery power fluctuates a little or changes, it is not a problem.

Each pixel draws up to 60mA (for full brightness white all three RGB LEDs on). At 30 FPS, an Arduino is able to drive up to 500 pixels (after that it will run out of RAM). It is possible to string them up to 6″ apart by using ribbon cable (after that, you are likely to experience data corruption and power droops).

Every order comes with 4 pixels, individually controllable. (In the photos above we show the pixels with headers soldered on), but note that they do not come with any headers included. You can buy them separately if you want.

The detailed NeoPixel Überguide contains all you may need to use all shapes and sizes of NeoPixels. Including easy to consult library and example code for Trinket/Gemma, the Arduino UNO/Duemilanove/Diecimila, Flora/Micro/Leonardo, Arduino Due and Arduino Mega/ADK (in all their versions).

RGB Smart NeoPixel Technical Details are:

• Dimensions: 0.4″ x 0.5″ x 0.1″ / 10.2mm x 12.7mm x 2.5mm
• 0.5″ (12.5mm) diameter circle PCB, 0.1″ (2.5mm) total thickness
• 800 KHz speed protocol
• Chainable design
• 5-9VDC power (it can run at 3.5V but the colour will appear dimmed)
• Constant current 18.5mA per LED (max total per pixel: ~55mA)
• Fritzing Library and NeoPixel EagleCAD PCB files are available in the NeoPixel tutorial

Adafruit name: Breadboard-friendly RGB Smart NeoPixel – Pack of 4