DotStar LEDs are 5050-sized LEDs on a flexible strip with an embedded microcontroller inside the LED. The strips are made of flexible PCB material and are supplied with a weatherproof sheathing. They can be cut to any size using the cut lines after every LED or connected together to make longer strips. A 5V DC power supply must be used as any higher than 6V can destroy the entire strip.

To control the LEDs, use a generic 2-wire SPI. The colour/brightness of each LED is set using 24-bit colour (8 bits each for red, green and blue). Each LED acts like a shift register, reading incoming colour data on the input pins then shifting out the previous colour data on the output pin. By sending a long string of data, you can therefore control many LEDs.

The PWM is built into each LED-chip and they have high refresh rates. In Persistence-of-Vision (POV) applications, you have less flickering, particularly at low brightness levels. DotStars have a 20 kHz PWM rate, so even when moving the strip around, you cannot see the pixelation and the colour blending is smooth.

Each strip comes with a 4-pin JST SM connector at one end. These LEDs have 2 wires (input and output) for sending data - one clock pin and one data pin. The clock and data is separated so you can use any processor speed or type to control these strips. Hardware SPI support is handy but not required. Use DotStars with any microcontroller or microprocessor, including Arduino, Raspberry Pi, BeagleBone, Propeller and SparkCore.

Currently, there are two versions available from RS:

Adafruit 2328 - 0.5 m Black LED Strip with 72 RGB LEDs (RS 124-5482)
Adafruit 2329 - 0.5 m White LED Strip with 72 RGB LEDs (RS 124-5483)

Adafruit LEDs, Drivers and Shields