Adafruit DotStar RGB LED Disk - 240mm diameter

Bullseye! This disk is chock full of 255 Dotstar LEDs and it's BRIGHT! The Dotstar RGB LED Disk is sprinkled with digitally-addressable LEDs, comes on a white PCB with two 4 pin JST-SM connectors already soldered to it so it's ready to rock straight out of the box. These are the same integrated LEDs that are used in our new fancy DotStar strips.

This tiny 5050 (5mm x 5mm) SMD LED is the most compact way to integrate multiple bright LEDs into a design. Instead of NeoPixels, this disk uses DotStar LEDs, which employ a 2-wire protocol that is less timing-specific, with high-frequency PWM for smoother color blending. Like NeoPixels, DotStar LEDs are 5050-sized LEDs with an embedded microcontroller inside the LED.

You can set the color/brightness of each LED to 24-bit color (8 bits each for red, green, and blue). Each LED acts like a shift register, reading incoming color data on the input pins and shifting the previous color data out on the output pin. Sending a long string of data allows control over an infinite number of LEDs.

The PWM is built into each LED chip; once you set the color, you can stop talking to the disk, and it will continue to PWM all the LEDs for you. DotStars have a 20 KHz PWM rate, ensuring smooth color blending, even when moving the disk around, unlike NeoPixels, which operate at 400 Hz.

A robust power supply is necessary to fully light up this disk, so picking up a 5V 10A power supply is recommended. Explore wiring, power usage calculations, and example code for usage in the provided tutorial.