Adafruit Learning System

Categories: Gaming

Categories: FLORA

Categories: Manufacturing
Shipping

Categories: Gaming

Categories: Learn Raspberry Pi

Categories: Hand Tools
Instruments

Candle Flicker Hair Bow

Super simple wearable sparkle

Add a twinkling accent to your updo with this soft circuit hair bow! This is the perfect beginner project in wearables, appropriate for kids and adults alike.

All About LEDs

A detailed introduction on how to use LEDs

This tutorial will cover those wonderful blinky things, LEDs. We're also going to cover how to calculate the current going through an LED and in the mean time introduce two important laws of electronics, Kirchhoff's Voltage Law and Ohm's Law.

Digital LED Belt

Programmable LED fashion from the futureProgrammable LED fashion from the future

By popular demand, we now have a project tutorial for how to make your own programmable, ultra-blinky LED belt. Perfect for parties, raves, parades, weddings, funerals, and bar mitzvahs. Wear it with pride, wear it with blinky! Follow this tutorial to build your own heirloom LED belt, and hand it down to your grandkids.

32x16 and 32x32 RGB LED Matrix

512 pixels of eye-blasting glory

Bring a little bit of Times Square into your home with our 16 x 32 and 32 x 32 RGB LED matrix panels. These panels are normally used to make video walls – here in New York we see them on the sides of buses and on bus stops – to display animations or short video clips. We thought they looked really cool so we picked up a few boxes from the factory. One has 512 bright RGB LEDs arranged in a 16x32 grid on the front, the other has 1024 LEDs in a 32x32 grid. Learn how to get this LED matrix up and running with an Arduino.

Tiny Arduino Music Visualizer

Maximum blinkenlights, minimum effort!

This easy project combines an Arduino with our microphone amplifier and bicolor LED matrix to create a music visualizer that responds to ambient sound.

RGB LED Strips

Glowy goodness!

We love some good LED blinking as much as the next person but after years of LED-soldering we need something cooler to get us excited. Sure there are RGB LEDs and those are fun too but what comes after that? Well, we have the answer: LED Strips! These are flexible circuit boards with full color LEDs soldered on. They take a lot of LED-wiring-drudgery out of decorating a room, car, bicycle, costume, etc. Here is a quick tutorial on how to get an LED strip working with an Arduino.

Animating Multiple LED Backpacks

Lights! Action! MORE LIGHTS! MORE ACTION!

Adafruit LED backpacks make it incredibly simple to add small bitmapped displays to a project. Each requires just four wires: power, ground and two communication lines to a microcontroller. Here’s how to use more than one 8x8 matrix backpack in an Arduino sketch.

Solderless RGB LED Clips

Hook up RGB LED strip easily and without soldering! These clips make it super simple to affix two strips together, either with an extension or a coupler, and third option allows easy connection to a power supply and controller.

Adafruit LED Backpacks

Control small LED matrices with ease

What's better than a single LED? Lots of LEDs! The matrices use a driver chip that does all the heavy lifting for you: They have a built in clock so they multiplex the display. They use constant-current drivers for ultra-bright, consistent color, 1/16 step display dimming, all via a simple I2C interface. Here is a detailed guide showing you how to solder, wire and control the display.

FPGA RGB Matrix

Control large RGB LED matrices using an FPGA

Adafruit currently sells a really cool 16x32 RGB LED matrix panel in their store that is "designed to be driven by an FPGA or other high speed processor." The purpose of this tutorial is to help you get started driving a small handful of these displays with the DE0-Nano board, which contains a mid-range Altera FPGA.

12mm LED Pixels

12mm silicone-encased glowy dots!

RGB Pixels are digitally-controllable lights you can set to any color, or animate. Each pixel contains an RGB LED and a controller chip molded into a 'dot' of silicone, with flanges so they can be pushed into holes in thin sheet material. The dots are waterproof and rugged — they're typically used to make outdoor signs.

20mm LED Pixels

20mm Diameter Glowy Dots!

RGB Pixels are digitally-controllable lights you can set to any color, or animate. Each pixel contains an RGB LED and a controller chip molded into a 'dot' of silicone, with flanges so they can be pushed into holes in thin sheet material. The dots are waterproof and rugged — they're typically used to make outdoor signs.

LED Bicycle Handlebars

Super bright onboard lights

Add a strip of LEDs to your bicycle handlebars for extra visibility and fun at night. This easy project requires only a few parts and very little soldering.

36mm LED Pixels

Big Square Glowy Dots!

Our 36mm square pixels are our biggest and brightest! They feature four LEDs total and come in a flat metal square 'plate' that is flooded with epoxy. They require 12VDC power and can draw up to 120mA per pixel.

Digital RGB LED Strip

Glowy, flexy and addressable!

Digital LED strips are flexible circuit boards with full color LEDs soldered on. They take a lot of LED-wiring-drudgery out of decorating a room, car, bicycle, costume, etc. The ones we carry come with a removable waterproof casing.

HL1606 LED Strip

Glowy, flexy and addressable!

This tutorial is for our older (no longer stocked) HL1606-based flexible LED strips. For new projects we recommend LPD8806 strips in their place.

Battery Power for LED Pixels and Strips

Easily adapt your LED projects for portable use

Here's how to use our addressable LED strips and pixels for portable projects — bicycles, costumes and fashion accessories — using readily-available AA cells.

Adalight Project Pack

Mood lighting for your media PC

Build your own ambient-light addition for a monitor or media PC television! By running the Processing code on your computer, the halo of LEDs will follow the screen colors to provide an awesome ambient light display that adds pop to TV shows, movies or games! Works using open source Processing and Arduino - so it'll run on Mac, Windows or Linux computers!