Exciting! A new product of my design just hit the market last week! World, meet Pixie β a 3W chainable smart LED Pixel. Kind of a long titleβ¦ what does it mean?
LED Pixel: The Pixie is a color LED module, allowing an external controller to change its color and brightness dynamically.
Chainable: The module is designed so that you can chain many of them and control each one individually. If you know NeoPixels, this concept should be clear, but in case you donβt, imagine you want to build a project that requires 50 LEDs to be individually controlled. Naively, you would need to power each on of them individually, then connect each one of them individually to a controller. This would require tons of wiring, many pins on the controller, each one possibly driven by a specialized peripheral, such as UART or PWM. In short, this is not practical.With the Pixie, being chainable, you connect the first LEDβs input pins to power and a single control pin (serial TX) on the controller. Then you connect the first LEDβs output pins (power, ground, data) to the input of the second LED, and so on. Each Pixie in the chain consumes its own data, then relays the rest of the data down the chain, so the controller can control each Pixie individually, without being connected to each one.
3W:Β 3 Watts of power drive the LED, or 1 Watt for each Red, Green, Blue. This is a VERY bright LED. Compare to typical NeoPixels, which are around 0.2W.
Smart: Some really high-end features are available on each Pixie, such as Gamma correction (8-bit to 16-bit) for super-smooth color gradients, over-heating protection (these things do get hot if left on at full blast for too long), communication loss protection.
For more detail:Β Pixie β Bright Things Come in Small Packages