8 Pixel RGBW Chainable Stick with Grove Connectors
This is our 8 Pixel Programmable RGBW Strip. This is a small chainable board with eight 5050 SK6812RGBW RGBW LEDs. The SK6812s are each individually addressable as the driver chip is located inside the LED. Each Stick has ~18mA constant current drive so the color will be very consistent even if the voltage varies, and requires near 5V.
Each Pixel is controlled by a daisy-chained serial bit. All four LEDs (RGBW) are controllable with an 8 bit value, giving a total of 32 bits per pixel. They can be driven by a GPIO line, but the timing is tricky so we have suppled the libraries below to get you going.
See a 5 pack of 8 Pixel Sticks here.
See a single Pixel board here.
Each stick is carefully sized so you can build evenly spaced larger displays out of these sticks.
This stick is NeoPixel compatible.
Each 8 Pixel stick has two Grove connectors. One for input and then one for output. To chain thee stick you connect the output of one stick to the input of another stick and then so on. No soldering required!
Why a strip of 8?
After talking with customers, it was decided that the stick should have a power of 2 number of pixels and 8 was a good compromise. The more important feature of this choice is that the board is symmetrical in every direction so they can be evenly stacked to create larger displays.
Building Larger Displays from the 8 Pixel Stick
Since the stick is symmetrical, building larger displays with the 8 Pixel Stick is simple. You mount the sticks next to each other and then daisy chain them together using Grove connectors. Large displays will take more power than can be supplied by a computer, so you may have to feed 5V into the provided pins.
Downloads
What is a NeoPixel?
NeoPixels (Trademark of Adafruit) are what component maker and seller Adafruit calls RGBW (Red, Green, Blue, White) LEDs with integrated controllers.