16 RGB LED WS2812 programmable ring – 67.8mm diameter

This Neopixel ring is made up of 16 fully controllable RGB LEDs, each able to create 256 colour shades, for a stunning range of more than 16 million colours. Communication uses a One-Wire serial data channel, so the ring can be driven by microcontrollers such as Arduino, PIC, mbed and others.

The refresh rate can be set as you like for smooth, engaging light effects. Try daisy-chaining several rings to create a wide variety of lighting effects. The required power supply is 5 Vdc.

Please note! because the protocol is very timing-sensitive it needs a real time microcontroller such as an AVR, Arduino, PIC, mbed and so on. It cannot be used with a Linux-based microcomputer or with a microcontroller such as Netduino or Basic Stamp. The Adafruit NeoPixel library (www.adafruit.com), which is freely available, is written for Arduino.

Neopixel is essentially a driver and its RGB LED integrated into a single SMD package, which allows each LED to be driven directly. The data channel used to talk to the Neopixel LEDs, and therefore to the strips, is similar to One-Wire. Neopixel LEDs are designed to run on 5 volt; communication runs at up to 800 kbps. The Neopixel command protocol sends groups of three bytes in a 24 bit string, each of which holds the brightness of one primary colour (first the eight bits of green, then those of red and finally those of green).

• NeoPixel Library