Adafruit has this week announced the arrival of new LED hardware in the form of DotStar Micro LEDs reference : APA102–2020) and Smart SMD RGB LEDs which are available in a pack of 10.
The new LED lights are extremely small but extremely bright and provide mini versions of the ones that are used in the Adafruit digital DotStart strips and matrices with full chainable 2-wire control.
Adafruit explains a little more about the new LED products which are now available to purchase directly from their online store.
They are just mind-bogglingly small. They are a mere 2mm x 2mm (way smaller than APA102-5050-RGB), which makes them pretty darn tiny so they might be a bit difficult to hand solder. SMT techniques with solder paste and hot air will work best here.
There are three LEDs inside, red green and blue. The RGB LEDs are controlled by a tiny chip that takes a 24-bit color level via the clock and data in and then does all the PWM control for you. So you just ‘set’ the color data once. Like DotStars (and the similar NeoPixels) you can chain them together, the output of one leading into the input of another for near-infinitely long strips. Comes in a strip of 10 pieces. If you order more than one strip, it will come as multiple strips of 10, not one long strip.
For more information on the new DotStar Micro LEDs jump over to the Adafruit website for details by following the link below.
Source: Adafruit