12 RGB LED Ring, 5050 WS2812 with Built-In Driver

Warning! Because the protocol is very sensitive to timing, it needs a real-time microcontroller such as AVR, Arduino, PIC, mbed and so on. It cannot be used with a Linux-based microcomputer or with microcontrollers such as Netduino or Basic Stamp. Adafruit’s NeoPixel library (www.adafruit.com), available free of charge, is written for Arduino.

Every RGB LED can be addressed individually through its own command in the serial string, and can produce up to 256 shades of each colour, for a total of 16,777,216 colour combinations. NeoPixel is a solution that packs a driver and its RGB LED into a single SMD package, so that each LED can be controlled directly. The data channel used to talk to NeoPixel LEDs and the matching strips is similar to the One-Wire protocol.

NeoPixel LEDs are designed to run on 5 volts and communicate at up to 800 kbps. The NeoPixel command protocol sends groups of three bytes in a 24 bit string, each carrying the brightness of one primary colour (first the eight bits for green, then those for red and finally those for blue).

• NeoPixel Überguide
• NeoPixel Library