Adafruit CharliePlex LED Matrix Bonnet – 8×16 Red LEDs

You won’t be able to look away from the mesmerising patterns created by this Adafruit CharliePlex LED Matrix Display Bonnet.  This 16×8 LED display can be placed atop any Raspberry Pi computer with a 2×20 connector for a beautiful, bright grid of 128 charlieplexed LEDs. It even comes with a built-in Charlieplex driver that runs over I2C.

We carry these Bonnets in a few vivid colors – this is the red LED matrix.

What is particularly nice about this Wing is that the I2C LED driver chip can PWM each individual LED in a 16×8 grid so you can have beautiful LED lighting effects without a lot of pin-twiddling. Simply tell the chip which LED on the grid you want lit and what brightness, and it’s all taken care of for you. You get 8-bit (256 level) dimming for each individual LED.

The IS31FL3731 is a nice little chip that runs happily over 3.3V power. Inside is enough RAM for 8 separate frames of display memory so you can set up multiple frames of an animation and flip them to be displayed with a single command. Since it uses I2C, it takes up only the SDA/SCL pins on your Pi and can share them with other I2C devices and sensors.

Comes fully assembled, with no soldering required so that you can plug it in immediately. To program it, you’ll use our CircuitPython library, which works with Linux computers like Raspberry Pi. After a pip install, run some of the examples to display simple graphics or text.

Specifications

• Product Dimensions: 65.0mm x 30.6mm x 5.5mm
• Product Weight: 8.1g

Resources

• Primary Guide: Adafruit CharliePlex LED Matrix Bonnet

Package Contents

• 1x Adafruit CharliePlex LED Matrix Bonnet – 8×16 Red LEDs