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Note: These are not the Adafruit 12mm Diffused Flat Digital RGB LED Pixels (Strand of 25), although they look and behave the same (they use the same WS2801 chipset). The wiring color standard is different, and these are shorter strands of 20, not 25.

RGB LEDs are undoubtedly cool, especially when you can chain them together for neat effects. But if you have more than just a few to chain, it gets cumbersome. That’s where the Stringxels (strings of pixels) come in to make it easy.

Each unit of the stringxel features a silicon-overmolded water-resistant 8mm diffused RGB LED that looks fabulous. These 20-unit chains are wired together with beefy & flexible 20AWG ribbon cable, spaced 11cm (4-3/8″) apart, but unlike standard holiday LED light strings, you get to program their behavior!

Each stringxel unit features the well-documented WS2801 RGB controller IC, so you simply power up the string with 5V, and use common data-shifting techniques to clock in your data to each Stringxel. This isn’t quite the same as addressable LEDs, where each LED has a set permanent address; stringxel data is clocked “down the chain”, one stringxel at a time. When clocking is done, all the units latch, and light up the RGB data passed to them. It’s all documented in the Arduino sample code available under the Resources tab.

The same factory that manufactures these square-base units also makes a Bullet-type RGB LED Stringxels for more compact designs benefiting from a skinnier/tube-like form factor.

One strip draws ~1.0A at full brightness, so you are welcome to use the 5V 1A power adapter with it. If you are connecting more than one, we recommend a hardcore power supply that can handle quite a few amps (20A to be precise!). Or you could use a capable LiPo battery and add a buff 5V regulator with it to get this string off the grid. Yes, 5V doesn’t usually carry very far down a wire, but that’s the reason for the beefy 20AWG stranded wire. We cannot visually detect a difference from the first to the last stringxel!

If you need to patch strings together, we’ve got 3-conductor cables ideal for this. Keep in mind, these do not have the 5V line wired into the connector, as it’s expected you would be further feeding a better 5V source “down the chain” to keep the brightness up.

Applications:

Wiring (Different from Bullet-type):

Features:

RGB LEDs are undoubtedly cool, especially when you can chain them together for neat effects. But if you have more than just a few to chain, it gets cumbersome. That’s where the Bullet Stringxels (strings of pixels) come in to make it easy.

Each unit of the stringxel features a silicon-overmolded water-resistant 8mm diffused RGB LED that looks fabulous. These 20-unit chains are wired together with beefy & flexible 20AWG ribbon cable, spaced 8cm (3-1/8″) apart, but unlike standard holiday LED light strings, you get to program their behavior!

Each stringxel unit features the well-documented WS2801 RGB controller IC, so you simply power up the string with 5V, and use common data-shifting techniques to clock in your data to each Stringxel. This isn’t quite the same as addressable LEDs, where each LED has a set permanent address; stringxel data is clocked “down the chain”, as you are passing LED data down the chain, one stringxel at a time. When clocking is done, all the units latch, and light up the RGB data passed to them. It’s all documented in the Arduino sample code available under the Resources tab.

Note: These are not the Adafruit 12mm Diffused Thin Digital RGB LED Pixels (Strand of 25), although they look and behave the same (they use the same WS2801 chipset). The wiring color standard is different, and these are shorter strands of 20, not 25.

If you’re looking for a flatter way to install them, or a shorter string, we also have the 20-pack Flat-type RGB LED Stringxels.

One strip draws ~0.9A at full brightness, so we recommend a hardcore power supply that can handle quite a few amps (20A to be precise!). Or you could use a capable LiPo battery and add a buff 5V regulator with it to get this string off the grid. Yes, 5V doesn’t usually carry very far down a wire, but that’s the reason for the beefy 20AWG stranded wire. We cannot visually detect a difference from the first to the 20th stringxel!

Regarding power requirements: Yes, running RGB strips at full 100% on makes them white, and makes it draw maximum 0.9A. Our own experiments show that random RGB effects not using much white draws approximately 40~70% maximum draw. But it’s always best to oversize your power supply by 20% than be under by 20%! And if you’re looking for easy ways to connect the strings, check out the connectors!

Applications:

Wiring (Different from Flat-type):

Features:

 

Check out this video of Stringxels controlled by SB-FireFly:

After you’ve thrown out your broken & crushed wassizthingy, you’re usually left with the power adapter. Another power adapter for the junk drawer. Wouldn’t it be nice to put it to some use, except for that funky useless 46 pin X-shaped proprietary connector. Grrr. Darn user-hostile hardware.

BUT, what if you could snip off the funky connector and replace it with something familiar, and reliable? Yup, here’s just the perfect solution!

These screw-terminal 2.5mm male socket/female jack connector sets fit the purpose exactly! Snip the wire, measure the polarity, and match them into the labelled terminals for traditional “tip-positive” configuration.

This is another great connector for putting power to stringxels and stripxels!

Note: The 2.5mm pin diameter is less common than the 2.1mm version, but is easily the 2nd most popular. Surely you’ve tried to plug into what appears to be a 2.1mm jack, but won’t fit? Yup, probably 2.5mm!

These are sold in matched jack-and-socket sets.

This power supply may not be as beastly as our 5V 20A supply but it does have the added benefit of being sealed and a smaller size. This supply great for powering a bunch of strands of Stringxels or a lot of servo motors. It can supply 5V DC up to 10 Amps, running from 110V or 220V power.

This unit comes with a US/Canada/Japan 2-prong plug and the output connects to a center positive 2.1mm DC plug. There’s also a green LED indicator to let you know that power is getting to the module.

Specifications:

This pair of 3-pin JST SM pigtail connectors mate perfectly with the addressable RGB Stringxels. They also make a good general purpose connector for any project. Each pack comes with one male and one female connector. Each connector features 9cm (3.5″) wire leads and are terminated with a JST SM connector on one end and left bare on the other.

The Stringxels have 4 wires, but only 3 are wired to a connector containing the ground, clock, and data lines. 5V usually doesn’t carry far, so running separate 5V leads to the other segments is expected.

Features:

These 4-pin JST SM pigtail connectors mate perfectly with the RGB LED strips. They also make a good general purpose connector for any project. Each pack comes with one male and one female connector. The wire leads are 6 inches long and are terminated with a JST SM connector on one end and left bare on the other.

Ah, those crazy factories. We bought these to match up with our RGB Stringxel bullets LEDs, but the colors don’t match. Good thing electrons don’t care. Just be aware that the pinout colors will not match!

Features

After you’ve thrown out your broken & crushed wassizthingy, you’re usually left with the power adapter. Another power adapter for the junk drawer. Wouldn’t it be nice to put it to some use, except for that funky useless 46 pin X-shaped proprietary connector. Grrr. Darn user-hostile hardware.

BUT, what if you could snip off the funky connector and replace it with something familiar, and reliable? Yup, here’s just the perfect solution!

These screw-terminal 2.1mm male/female socket connector sets fit the purpose exactly! Snip the wire, measure the polarity, and match them into the labelled terminals for traditional “tip-positive” configuration. Use them for extending the power wires going to your Freeduino board! They are also handy for power going to your stringxels or stripxels.

These are sold in matched plug-and-socket sets.

How often do you get a kit where the battery is included? This super small microcontroller is a ready to go ATtiny85 application board that is a smoothly routed, small form factor, through-hole soldering kit. Don’t know how to solder? No worries, this is a great place to start; we have a quick soldering guide in the manual to walk you through the soldering process as long as you have the tools to do it. The kit includes everything, even the battery, to make your own blinky LED project!

We are now on version 2 of SB-FireFly and it is now Digispark (the wildly successful kickstarter project) layout compatible, so you can add Digispark shields onto it. We walk you through building it into this configuration in our newly revised manual (under the Documentation tab). If you don’t have that much of a desire to hack the board feel free to just build the SB-FireFly as it was originally intended, all the instructions are still there. With version 2 we’ve also updated the code to include a new “Rainbow” mode, perfect for RGB LEDs (like in the Northern Lights Bundle) and it now also has the ability to remember the last mode you set if you ever power it down! If you have the previous version of the FireFly not to worry as the code is backward compatible, and located under the Documentation tab.

It has tons of potential, including wearables, – place the it on your clothes then from the other side, apply a magnet to the back of the battery area and you’ll have a SB-FireFly badge! It can also be placed onto a small key ring for a blinky keychain or lanyard, or thread a small string through it for a necklace.

The SB-FireFly features an Arduino-accommodating ATtiny85 microcontroller, so with a minor adjustment (thanks to those smart MIT people) to your Arduino programming IDE, you can reprogram it to suit your whim (check out the instructions in our manual). It also is a handy development/application board to make practical use of this small microcontroller. If you wanted to use AVR studio with a avr programmer by all means you can go that route as well.

The board also has a cleverly hidden 3-pin expansion port usable for project enhancement!

Here are the modes the SB-FireFly comes pre-programmed with (toggled via the button):

Firefly Modes: Press1 Press2 Press3 Press4
Blink All Slow Regular Fast Sleep
Metronome Slow Regular Fast Sleep
Disco Slow Regular Fast Sleep
Fading Eyes Slow Regular Fast Sleep
Firefly Slow Regular Fast Sleep
Rainbow Slow Regular Fast Sleep

 

Applications:

The Kit includes:

Specifications:

This open-source project was originally developed as a local collaboration with an Awesome Calgary micro grant winner: Illuminated Landscapes. Here’s some history on how this project began:

Want to change what the SB-FireFly can do? No prob, besides an LED blinker the SB-FireFly is a fully functional ATtiny85 development/application board which has all of the ATtiny pins broken out for your hacking convenience! Not only is this an open-source hardware product but it also has sample code which is able to be modified to your liking. Use this tutorial to program it within the Arduino IDE! Check under our documentation tab where we give you sample Arduino code that features Software PWM (doesn’t use hardware timers), Sleep (0.0002mA draw), Randomize and Interrupt code which can be used on other avr chips such as the common ATmega328 on Arduino/Freeduino boards. Plus we’ll add more code for different projects as we make & write them. Check out the Documentation section for some recent code samples & hacks!

Hacklications:

Here’s a few tips that will help you hack the SB-FireFly:

Please Note: Due to the outdated avr-gcc compiler bundled with Arduino 1.0 the ATtiny85 throws up an “R_AVR_13_PCREL” error when trying to use the upper half of the 8kB of code space. If you need this code space when your program goes above 4kB apply a quick fix found here. Applying the fix will give you access to the full 8kB.

Check out this video of Stringxels controlled by SB-FireFly:

Please note: LEDs may not be as pictured, varies according to stock levels.

Here’s another bunch of links for your viewing pleasure. Under the current meteorological conditions we wonder who would consider looking at screens, because, you know, real life takes over sometimes, especially when it is so nice outside, at least in our neighborhood.

A clock that uses sixty RGB pixels
Hey, we made that! Well, almost. This clock uses RGB LED Stringxels, Arduino, DS1307, light sensitive resistor and the Chronodot.
Microsoft Kinect Learns to Read Hand Gestures, Minority Report-Style Interface Now Possible
Kinect allows to track the body’s posture as you move around, but until now it couldn’t track the fine hand movements. Now it has that ability and that opens up a whole world of new applications.
blank LighTouch
An Arduino, music shield and an ultrasonic rangefinder are the basis of this clever music player that – again – uses hand gestures to control the volume. Never touch your music player again!
Prototype Triangle Numéro 1 wooden T-shirt by Pauline Marcombe
 We’ve seen many things laser-cut, including wearable ones. Triangles of MDF assembled with wire make a perfect t-shirt, did you know? And it looks stunning, too.
blank HERB Learns to Separate Oreos, Probably Thinks Humans are Crazy
 Teaching a robot to separate cream from the Oreo cookies is an absurdly awesome idea. The combination of control, precision, extra joints in Herb’s arms and Oreo-detecting abilities allow to do that. Success!

So if you are less fortunate with weather or feel like staring at shiny pixels – visit us regularly, there’s always something new to distract you from stuff, outdoors or in.

I’ve been wanting to post in limerick, and today I think I’ll give it a kick. My co-workers think it’s dumb, but I think it’s kinda fun. And I’m sure it’ll turn out quite slick.

In order to avoid some tough restrictions, I won’t use limerick for product descriptions. It’d also make some people sick, and want to beat me with a stick. So I’ll switch to normal verse to avoid any conniptions.

This week we have a fancy new video clip,  that’s a demo for a nifty new LED strip. It’s wrapped around in a spool, and looks pretty darn cool. There’s also links down below you shouldn’t skip.

blank 5V RGB LED Stripxels (1m)
$35.00
Don’t want to bother with trying to control 12V RGB strips with MOSFETs, well here you go: Solarbotics now carries 5V RGB LED Stripxels which has 32 RGB LEDs per meter that can be individually controlled and only requires a 5V source and TTL Clock & Data signals. How’s that for ease of use?
blank 5V Flat-type RGB LED Stringxels (Strand of 20)
$32.00
These are strands of SMART RGB LEDs Pixels, that have been used to create huge outdoor displays, and we’ve got some in smaller strands for your projects!
blank 5V Bullet-type RGB LED Stringxels (Strand of 40)
$64.00
Want individually-controlled, color changing LED pixels that can be securely mounted in your application and have enough waterproofing to survive outdoors? The 40 strand RGB LED Stringxels are here to save the day!
blank Switching Power Supply 5V @ 20A
$20.00
When we talk about some of our power supplies & adapters being beefy or buff, sorry, we lied! This Switching Power supply is the Granddaddy of them all, it supplies 5V at 20Amps.

This is all we got for this Friday afternoon, and we’ll be off for the weekend quite soon. We hope you’ve quite enjoyed this (questionable) poetic employ, and that you don’t get crushed by a meteorological balloon.