You thought it couldn't get better than Adafruit's world-famous 32-LED-per-meter Digital LED strip but we will prove you wrong! These NeoPixel strips have 30 digitally-addressable pixel LEDs per meter and are very affordable and are only 12.5 mm wide, 10 mm if you remove the strip from the casing.
This is the strip with black flex PCB, its identical to the white 30 LED/meter except it has a different color mask on the flex strip There are some things to watch for:
- These LED's use about 9.5 Watts max (~2 Amps @ 5V) per meter. The max rating is assuming all the LEDs are on full white, usually the actual current for colorful design is about 1/3 to 1/2 the max current. A good power supply such as our 5V 2A or 10A supply is key!
- To make the strip thin and easier to manufacture, the controller chip is inside the LED, which is kind of cool, but also means that the chip only uses a single pin for input and a single pin for output. The protocol used is very very timing-specific and can only be controlled by microcontrollers with highly repeatable 100nS timing precision. We have example code for using with the Arduino Uno/Mega microcontroller at 8MHz and 16MHz, but it will not work with the Raspberry Pi, Basic Stamp, NETduino, any other interpreted/virtual machine microprocessor or any processor slower than 8 MHz. For those processors, check our 32 LED/meter digital LED strip which has SPI-like input/output and works well with Pi, NETduino, and other processors.
- The way the pixels are controlled by an Arduino, the entire strip must be buffered in memory, and we've found many Arduino UNO projects only have about a 1500bytes of RAM available after all the extras are included - enough for about 500 LED pixels. If you want to drive the entire strip and have some other libraries included, you may need to use a Mega.
There are 30 RGB LEDs per meter, and you can control each LED individually! Yes, that's right, this is the digitally-addressable type of LED strip. You can set the color of each LED's red, green and blue component with 8-bit PWM precision (so 24-bit color per pixel). The LEDs are controlled by shift-registers that are chained up down the strip so you can shorten or lengthen the strip. Only 1 digital output pin are required to send data down. The PWM is built into each LED-chip so once you set the color you can stop talking to the strip and it will continue to PWM all the LEDs for you The strip is made of flexible PCB material, and comes with a weatherproof sheathing. You can cut this stuff pretty easily with wire cutters, there are cut-lines every 1.3"/3.4cm (1 LED each). Solder to the 0.1" copper pads and you're good to go. Of course, you can also connect strips together to make them longer, just watch how much current you need!
You must use a 5V DC power supply to power these strips, do not use higher than 6V or you can destroy the entire strip As of May 21, 2014 these come in 5 meter reels with a 2 or 3-pin JST SM connector on each end and separated power/ground wires. These strips are
sold by the meter! If you buy 5 meters at a time, you'll get full reels with two connectors. If you buy less than 5m, you'll get a single strip, but it will be a cut piece from a reel which may or may not have a connector on it. To wire up these strips we suggest picking up some JST SM plug and receptacle cables. You'll want one of each, one wire is for ground the other is for signal. For the power wire, you will also probably want a 2.1mm DC jack to wire in so you can connect one of our wall adapters to power it. Our detailed
NeoPixel Uberguide has everything you need to use NeoPixels in any shape and size. Including ready-to-go library & example code for the Arduino UNO/Duemilanove/Diecimila, Flora/Micro/Leonardo, Trinket/Gemma, Arduino Due & Arduino Mega/ADK (all versions).
