5 mm RGB Bullet Pixel LED

Breadboardable, individually addressable LEDs.

These remarkably bright diffused-lens 5 mm RGB LEDs each contain a tiny driver chip. You can daisy chain them in a linear array where every LED is individually addressable through a one wire communication protocol. While you will sometimes see these advertised (incorrectly) as "discrete WS2812 LEDs," the actual device is type PL9823, a nearly-identical device that is packaged by a different manufacturer.

We recommend using the "lightweight WS2812" library (available to download here) for working with these LEDs from AVR, Arduino, and ARM platforms.

The driving protocol is very similar to the popular WS2811/WS2812 chipset. You can read more about these LEDs here. Samurai Circuits has an additional Arduino compatible library available at their documentation site, but the lightweight WS2812 library remains our primary recommendation.

We've used these in our Mega Menorah 9000 kit as programmable LED candles.

Specifications:

• Minimum supply voltage 4.5 V
• Maximum supply voltage 6.0 V
• Typical current draw at full power 25 mA
• Datasheet (245 KB JPG)
• Note that these LED have the pin configuration described for 8 mm LEDs on the datasheet.