New products: Discrete addressable through-hole RGB LEDs

These look very useful but I was hoping to find out what mcd rating each of the colours have? Thanks.

We do not have the mcd ratings for those LEDs. Subjectively, I find it hard to look at directly at those LEDs at full brightness. However, you might need to test them for yourself to see if they will work in any project you have them in mind for. Fortunately, they are relatively inexpensive at $4.95 for a package of ten!

I bought 3 packs of the 5mm but could only get 8 in row to operate. The next 8 or so will flicker randomly and the rest nothing. I swapped them around and used a different breadboard to see if a single was causing the issue or the board itself but the same results. I used both the Pololu and Adafruit libraries and the same results. I have tested other strands on the same setups and they work perfectly. 25 pixel WS2811 12mm strand and 144 pixel WS2812b 5050 strip. Not sure why these are behaving this way. I would like to get all 30 in series.

Any ideas?

Hello, Robert.

We have seen something similar to what you describe when powering the LEDs strip with a voltage that was too high. Could you tell us how you are supplying power to the LEDs?

- Jeremy

I am using the same 5v supply as the others. I have tried using a battery pack with a 5v regulator and the same results. Then i tried the 5v regulator on the 5v supply and same results. I then broke out an isp and used your AVR code on an Attiny85 at 16mhz and the same results. First 8 are working perfectly, swapped some pixels around just in case, and the same results. I am stumped. I am just a shade tree programmer with minimal electronic skills but this is odd considering I can get the other strip to work just fine. Again I have swapped them all around so they work but just not more than 8 in a row. Any ideas?....

Can you get more than 10 in the setup you show on the sales page? The only thing I could just take a stab at is that these are on a breadboard and my other pixels are wired up.

These are nice pixels at a great price. I want to get them to work all in a row before I work on other projects with these.

Success! to solving the problem I created. I moved all to another style of breadboard(smaller) and I got 16 in a row to work!! I think the problem was actually my wiring so sorry for the trouble...

Awesome Pixels!!!

I am glad you got it working. Thanks for letting us know.

- Jeremy

I'm curious; the specs say these draw up to 50mA, but the picture shows 10 of them being driven by the controller's 5V output, which is supposed to have no more than 100mA (75 on that device) to spare. Are the numbers wrong, or did you just keep them very, very dim? (In case of the latter, you might want to say so, lest someone try this at home!)

In the picture, the board is powered by USB, which allows for more current then the 5V regulator can supply.

Also, as mentioned on the product pages for LEDs, an LED draws approximately 50mA when red, green, and blue are set to full brightness, which would result in a bright white light. This is not how the LEDs are being used in the picture.

- Jeremy

Nice Blog dear, with the technology today LED lights will be more uses of these useful lights in the future. I want to thank you for this excellent information!! I

I found these to flicker on solid white, low intesity. I had to use resisistors in the data lines and distributed electrolytics per a WS2812 datasheet which helped but the final fix was increasing the voltage to a critical 5.6VDC

Hello, Paul.

Thank you for sharing your solution to the problem you encountered!

Brandon