This week’s EYE ON NPI seems to be miiiiiighty aware of these of us who love our colourful lights, it’s Würth Elektronik’s RGB WL-ICLED Built-in Controller Inside LED.
WE’s tackle the ‘sensible LED’ has taken over the electronics business over the previous 15 years.
These ubiquitous LEDs can prevent time, pins, and value by simplifying the addition of as much as a couple-dozen colourful LEDs, particularly when the PCB dimension is at a premium.
Again in my day, when you needed so as to add plenty of colourful LEDs to a design, you’d have to make use of a devoted LED driver chip. That’s, except your microcontroller had tons of pins, and 10mA drive present – and even then there’s a complete current-draw restrict for the chip package deal. We nonetheless inventory some breakouts for these just like the TLC5947 a ‘chainable’ SPI board that would drive 8 RGB LEDs and PWM all of them for you, typically with a set-able constant-current. There’s nonetheless want for chips like this, however they’re typically kinda massive, they usually’re not free, so utilizing them was not a light-weight matter.
Then got here the primary – or near the primary – low value chainable LED driver: the LPD8806. We wrote a library for this chip in 2011, the way in which this chip labored is it might management two RGB LEDs per, with all PWM dealt with internally and also you solely wanted 2 pins! This was cheap and labored nice, however the chips had been nonetheless a bit massive, 14-SOICs.
They had been outmoded by the WS2811 which got here up with utilizing a Manchester encoding for transport over a single line. These used even much less house, and solely a single pin, with an SOIC-8 package deal.
Nonetheless, the actual ingenuity is when people realized they might put the chip INSIDE the LED: and thus was born what we name “NeoPixel” a totally chainable sensible LED that solely makes use of one pin and no exterior elements.
Now all’s been proper on this planet, with dozens of various shapes, configurations and sizes of ‘WS2812-compatible’ LEDs. However there was one factor lacking: a dependable supply of sensible LEDs. And we must always know as a result of we use plenty of these chips: and we attempt to warn people that low value LEDs have differing LED colour and brightnesses, are onerous to solder and rework, and endure excessive failure charges within the area. Worst of all, when one fails all those down the road additionally fail! Till right now you simply needed to cross your fingers and hope that the reel you bought was from a ‘good batch’.
That’s why we had been excited to see Würth Elektronik’s RGB WL-ICLED in DigiKey’s NPI record, as a result of WE is understood for top of the range, dependable merchandise.
Not like most NeoPixel compatibles, this datasheet specifies the LED brightnesses and spectra. It additionally has RoHS, REACh and Halogen compliance. Lastly, you understand you’ll be getting constant high quality, the place every LED solders simply in addition to final week’s or final yr’s batch.
The WL-ICLEDs can be found in 4 sizes, together with the widespread 5x5mm and 2x2mm.
Würth Elektronik additionally designed a cool FeatherWing with a whole lot of the 2x2mm ICLEDs to demo the right way to show animations, textual content, and graphics.
In order for you a NeoPixel appropriate LED, with trace-ability, excessive reliability and recognized performance take a look at Würth Elektronik’s RGB WL-ICLED accessible proper now at DigiKey! Order right now and also you’ll get your ready-to-assemble rainbows by tomorrow afternoon.
See the EYE on NPI video beneath and the producer’s video beneath that:
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