Basic stats

• 20mm diameter round waterproof pixels
• Approximately 3 inches (75mm) apart on 4-pin strand
• 5 Volts DC, 60 milliamps max per pixel (all LEDs on, full white)
• LPD6803 LED driver chip provides 15-bit color: Datasheet
• 2-pin SPI-like protocol — easy for Arduino and other microcontrollers

Here is a video showing our similar 12mm dots running a test pattern:

Each pixel contains a small microchip within the silicone dot. The LPD6803 LED driver chip is custom designed for this purpose. These chips are very simple to communicate with — all they do is shift color data in from one pin and out another. To issue data from a microcontroller such as an Arduino, one "shifts out" 16 bits of color information. To write data to 10 LEDs, you would issue 160 bits (10 * 16). Following the data, 32 zero bits will "latch" the data and show the new LED colors.

This chip can handle PWM for controlling color brightness, all it needs is a 'pixel PWM clock' which sets the PWM speed. The faster the clock, the smoother the color…but this signal has to travel all the way down the strand, so it can't be too fast or it'll snag the chips.

An interesting point is that the PWM clock is the same as the data clock. This is nice in that it saves a pin, but does mean that data must be carefully synchronized to the PWM counter in order to avoid unsightly flicker. This is okay but a little annoying because the PWM clock must be continuously issued, and on the Arduino this requires a timer interrupt and costs a fair chunk of CPU performance. We provide an Arduino library that takes care of all this unpleasantness behind the scenes, so you won’t have to fuss with the details.