Adafruit Neopixel Stick for LED Arrangement

• Each LED is addressable as the driver chip is inside the LED
• Each one has 18 mA constant current drive so the colour will be very consistent even if the voltage varies
• No external choke resistors are required making the design slim
• The LEDs are 'chainable' by connecting the output of one stick into the input of another
• Power the whole thing with 5VDC (4-7V works) and you're ready to rock

Adafruit NeoPixel Stick is used to make little LED strip arrangement. The endlessly inventive folk at Adafruit have crammed 8 of the tiny 5050 (5 mm x 5 mm) smart RGB LEDs onto a PCB with mounting holes and a chainable design. Use only one microcontroller pin to control as many as you can chain together. There is a single data line with a very timing-specific protocol. Since the protocol is very sensitive to timing, it requires a real-time microcontroller such as an AVR, Arduino, PIC, mbed, etc. It cannot be used with a Linux-based microcomputer or interpreted microcontroller such as the netduino or Basic Stamp. As it requires hand-tuned assembly it is only for AVR cores but others may have ported this chip driver code so please google around. An 8MHz or faster processor is required.