Home > Arduino & SCM Supplies > WS2812
The rings are "chainable" - connect the output pin of one to the input pin of another. 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 and you're ready to rock. 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 netduino or Basic Stamp. Our 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. We currently ship this product with the WS2812B 4-pin chip LED installed. Previous versions may have come with the WS2812S 6-pin LED. Both B and S LEDs can be chained together and are compatible with the NeoPixel Libary. The 'B chip type adds additional polarity protection and is the same brightness as the 'S type. When soldering these together£¬ line up the four pieces and connect all the GND and 5V pins together as shown above. Then for three out of the four pieces solder DIN to DOUT. The remaining DIN is the input pin for the entire ring.