We crammed ALL THE NEOPIXELS into this strip! An unbelievable 144 individually-controllable LED pixels on a flexible PCB. It's completely out of control and ready for you to blink. This strip has a black mask, and an extra heavy flex PCB.
These LED strips are even more fun and glowy. There are 144 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 and down the strip so you can shorten or lengthen the strip. Only 1 digital out pin is required to send data. 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.
All your high-density LED dreams answered, yet there are a few things to watch for.
- * First up, the ultra-high density means much higher power usage over a certain distance -35 Watts max (~7 Amps @ 5V). 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 10A supply is key!
- * Second, to get high density, 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, and with a little effort you can use with the Raspberry Pi, or Beagle Bone Black, but it will not work with the Basic Stamp, NETduino, any other interpreted/virtual machine microprocessor or any processor slower than 8 MHz. For those processors, check our DotStar digital LED strip which has SPI-like input/output and works easily with Pi, NETduino, and other processors.
- * Third, just because you have all those pixels doesn't mean you have the RAM for it - the entire strip must be buffered in memory, and we've found many Arduino UNO projects only have about 1500 bytes of RAM available after all the extras are included - enough for about 2-3 meters of the 144 LED pixels. If you want to drive multiple meters and have some other libraries included, use a Mega.
- * This strip now comes with a weatherproof sheathing, you can remove it if not wanted, with a pair of scissors.
Technical Details
Technical specs:
- - 144 LEDs per meter
- - Maximum 5V @ 60mA draw per LED (all LEDs on full brightness)
- - 5VDC power requirement (do not exceed 6VDC) - no polarity protection!
- - 1 integrated RGB LEDs per segment, individually controllable
- - LED wavelengths: 630nm/530nm/475nm
- - Connector: 3-pin JST SM
- - Strip Width: 15mm / 0.6"
- - Strip Thickness: 4mm / 0.16"
- - Weight: 35.42g
- - WS2812 Datasheet
- - SK6812 Datasheet
- - May ship with either WS2812B or SK6812-based LEDs. They are the same brightness, color and protocol
EN − TL
