Adafruit NeoPixel Stick - 8 x WS2812 5050 RGB LED

Make your own little LED strip arrangement with this stick of NeoPixel LEDs. The endlessly inventive folk at Adafruit have crammed 8 of the tiny 5050 (5mm x 5mm) 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!

• Each LED is addressable as the driver chip is inside the LED.
• Each one has ~18mA constant current drive so the color 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.

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 microconroller 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. Adafruits wonderfully-written Neopixel library for Arduino supports these pixels! 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. Comes as a single stick with 8 individually addressable RGB LEDs assembled and tested. Adafruit have provided a ready-to-go component for this in the Adafruit EAGLE library