Home > DIY Parts & Components > WS2811
WS2811 LED Driver Chip - Black (10PCS)
Description: Make your own smart LEDs with the same chip that is used in our NeoPixel strip and pixels. This tiny SOIC-8 is fairly easy to solder and can drive a single common-anode RGB LED or three single-color LEDs of your choice. (The outputs are NPN transistors so they won't work with common-cathode!) The outputs are each ~18mA constant current so the color will be very consistent even if the voltage varies£¬ and no choke resistors are required making your design minimal. The pixels are 'chainable' by connecting the output of one chip into the input of another - see the datasheet for diagrams and pinouts. To keep the chip small£¬ 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 microcontroller such as an AVR£¬ Arduino£¬ PIC£¬ mbed£¬ etc. It cannot be used with a Linux-based microcomputer or interpreted microcontroller such as the neutrino or Basic Stamp. There are two speeds supported by the chip£¬ one 400KHz and one 800KHz. Our wonderfully-written Neopixel library for Arduino supports both! 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. Using the slow timing rate£¬ 4MHz or faster processor is required. Comes in a package with 10 individual chips. We have a ready-to-go component for this in the Adafruit EAGLE library.