NeoPixel Stick - 8 x 5050 RGB LED with Integrated Drivers

by Adafruit

Make your own little LED strip arrangement with this stick of NeoPixel LEDs. Adafruit 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, and no external choke resistors are required making the design slim. Power the whole thing with 5VDC (4-7V works) and you're ready to rock.

The LEDs are 'chainable' by connecting the output of one stick into the input of another - see the photo above. 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. Adafruit's 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.

The detailed NeoPixel Uberguide has everything you need to use NeoPixels in any shape and size. Including ready-to-go library & example code for the Arduino UNO/Duemilanove/Diecimila, Flora/Micro/Leonardo, Trinket/Gemma, Arduino Due & Arduino Mega/ADK (all versions)

TECHNICAL DETAILS

11 customer reviews

2 years ago
ARRR GEEE BEEEE! I'm driving it with a microcontroller + circuitpython by adapting an Adafruit LCD library for the ST7565 (almost the same as the ST7567 in the GFX hat) and porting the Pimoroni SN3218 library to circuitpython. Works great! I don't need capacitive touch so not bothering with that.
by Tobias about GFX HAT - Retro LCD with RGB Backlight via REVIEWS.io
3 years ago
Prompt delivery. Worked out of the box with their examples. Great price at discounted price of £9. Perhaps some more detailed documentation would be useful.
by Andrew about GFX HAT - Retro LCD with RGB Backlight via REVIEWS.io
4 years ago
An incredibly priced device, great screen, the buttons work very well and the LEDs for each buttons are very appreciated. The RGB backlight with individually control zones is a great touch. I am currently using it with a pi to received and display SMS messages.
by Ryan about GFX HAT - Retro LCD with RGB Backlight via REVIEWS.io
4 years ago
Lovely upgrade to my display-o-tron, and inky phat... and though it’s not as higher resolution as the inky Phat, the ability to refresh the data quicker makes it much more useful
by neil about GFX HAT - Retro LCD with RGB Backlight via REVIEWS.io
5 years ago
Just bought my second one of these, great for small embedded projects. Pimoroni is becoming a favourite here too, I've bought quite a few things now and the goodies have always arrived quickly.
by Brian about GFX HAT - Retro LCD with RGB Backlight via REVIEWS.io

User photos