NEW PRODUCTS – Adafruit NeoPixel LED Strips with Alligator Clips

Adding glowy color to your projects has never been easier: no more soldering or stripping wires, clip ’em on and glow! We have them in two lengths: Adafruit NeoPixel LED Strip with Alligator Clips 30 LEDs/meter – 1 Meter AND 60 LED/m – 0.5 Meter Long. They’re not too long but have lots of glowing action. Perfect for use with a Circuit Playground, Circuit Playground Express, micro:bit or any other microcontroller board where you don’t want to noodle with a breadboard and wires.

The strips come with three 100mm long red/black/white alligator clips on the end. The other end is sealed. The alligator clips are even nicely color-coded: black for ground, white for signal, red for 3-5VDC power. We use SK6812 LEDs on these strips so you don’t need an inline resistor and they work down to 3V logic+power.

NeoPixels are addressable LEDs. That means, there are 60 RGB LEDs per meter and the strip is half a meter long so you get 30 individually-controlled RGB LEDs! You can set the color of each LED’s red, green and blue component with 8-bit PWM precision (so 24-bit color per pixel). The LEDs are controlled by shift-registers that are chained up down the strip so you can shorten the strip if you like by cutting it. Only 1 digital output pin are required to send data down. The PWM is built into each LED-chip so once you set the color you can stop talking to the strip, and it will continue to PWM all the LEDs for you

The strip is made of flexible PCB material, and comes in a weatherproof sheathing. You can cut this stuff pretty easily with wire cutters. Of course, you can also connect strips together to make them longer, just watch how much current you need! We have a 5V/2A supply that is able to drive this strip but chances are you will power these short strips direct from your microcontroller board. You must use a 3-5V DC power supply to power these strips, do not use higher than 6V or you can destroy the entire strip– yikes!

These LEDs use about 4.8 Watts max (~1 Amps @ 5V) per meter. The max rating is assuming all the LEDs are on full white, usually the actual current for colorful design is less than 1/3 of the max current. A good power supply is key!

Our detailed NeoPixel Uberguide has everything you need to use NeoPixels in any shape and size. Including ready-to-go library & example code for Arduino compatibles. You can also use these strips with MakeCode or CircuitPython using the NeoPixel software support.