Fairy Lights - Addressable RGB (5m) (PRT-16792)

[Core]

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Affectionately dubbed “Fairy Lights” for their similar appearance, these addressable RGB LED string lights are a great way to light up any project with no soldering…

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[Joshua208790]

Hello, this product says it has addressable RGB but I can’t find if the LEDs are individually addressable or any code library that works with these.

[Trent5487676]

Hi Joshua,

Welcome to the forum

I can understand your confusion regarding those fairy lights as there’s a bit of contradictory information out there regarding them.
The datasheet we’ve been provided for them lists the interface as SPI, but it’s clearly not a standard implementation of SPI with only 3 wires.
SparkFun has these lights listed as part of their WS2812 hookup guide which is probably the most common style of individually addressable RGB LEDs out there (also known by the trade names GlowBits and NeoPixels) and those lights do use a 1-wire data interface with the other two being power and ground.
https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/ws2812-breakout-hookup-guide#pinout

I’m fairly confident these LEDs should be individually addressable using the NeoPixel library but I’ll run a quick test with them on the bench later and report back.

[Joshua208790]

Thanks Trent, I really appreciate it!

[Trent5487676]

Hi Joshua,

I’ve finished a bench test with those fairy lights and my suspicion was correct, they appear to be WS2812 chips or equivalent so any NeoPixel or GlowBit library should be able to drive them.

I’ll contact our supplier later this morning as the stock I have here in the warehouse is definitely mislabelled. The fairy lights I tested were marked with WS2811&SK6812 which can’t be correct as WS2811 is the 12volt version of those chips. SK6812 is a drop in replacement for the common WS2812 though, as they are equivalent and a minor upgrade in terms of colour consistency across different supply voltages.

There were another couple of gotcha moments, the power pin is designated with a red stripe on one side of the lights and a blue stripe on the other.

The final small gotcha was that the label showing the pinout is connected to the output end of the string, not the data input end.

I’ll chase up these discrepancies and the incorrect datasheet with our supplier this morning and get the product page updated to make it clear these are WS2812, NeoPixel-equivalent strips.

[Joshua208790]

Awesome write up, thanks heaps man! I’ll keep an eye out for those gotchas too, cheers!