The Adafruit NeoPixel Addressable LED Shields have had an upgrade and now feature 8 x 5 RGB + Natural White (4500K) 5050 LEDs. The white LEDs are very intense and add a new dimension to your NeoPixel projects; with the 8-bit PWM you get 32-bits of colour. These seemingly simple gadgets have triggered an amazing array of creative projects, from watches and compasses to steampunk goggles and more. Each shield 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 shield into the data-in of another to control them both from the same microcontroller (MCU).
Since the data protocol has strict timing requirements, Arduino is an ideal choice to drive these shields. For testing purposes it's fine to power the shields using the Arduino's 5V line as long as all the pixels aren't on at the same time. Once you're happy you can write to the shield it would be best to connect an external 5V DC power supply and a 2-way terminal block is included for you to solder on if required. The shields are supplied with the fully assembled NeoPixel matrix, a strip of 0.1in. pin headers, a set of 0.1in. pitch female headers with long pins and the 2-way terminal block.
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 RGBW library, the RGB library will give odd results.
- 40-pixel RGBW NeoPixel Shield
- Natural white (4500K)
- Requires 5V DC power
- Shields can be daisy-chained together
- Adafruit part no.: 2865
*Customers looking to resell on eBay or Amazon should contact Adafruit directly.
| No. of LEDs |
40 |
| Shape |
Rectangle |
| Layout |
8 x 5 |
