NeoPixel Ring – 16 x WS2812 5050 RGB LED with Integrated Drivers

This Neo pixel ring can be easily programmed to follow a particular pattern or to change the colour pattern.

Round and round and round they go! 16 ultra bright smart LED NeoPixels are arranged in a circle with 1.75″ (44.5mm) outer diameter. 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 (4-7V works) 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 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. 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.

Comes as a single ring with 16 individually addressable RGB LEDs assembled and tested.

Technical details

• Dimensions: 
  • Outer diameter: 44.5mm / 1.8″;
  • Inner diameter: 31.7mm / 1.2″
  • Thickness: 6.7mm / 0.3″
• As of 7/16/204 we are now shipping with a standard-thickness PCB and we added an extra ground and power breakout
• Weight: 3.03g
• May ship with either WS2812B or SK6812-based LEDs. They are the same brightness, color and protocol