@markii: That’s the only place I was able to find them as well.

I think that only NXP has the worst ordering options for their components.
It’s like they are obsolete, but no they are not.

Hi AO,

I looked at the ShiftBrites, and while they essentially do the same thing as my LEDs (Change color), the working is fundamentally different. ShiftBrites, as the name implies, need to have serial data shifted through each ShiftBrite. This means for example if you have 100 ShiftBrites, to update the color of just 1 LED, you need to reshift the bits for each ShiftBrites. This takes time and is fundamentally slow.

Using the NXP chips I’m using, there is one I^2C bus which connects to all the NXP chips. First of all, a single NXP chip handles 5RGB LEDs, instead of just one with the ShiftBrite. Secondly, since there is one bus and each NXP chip has a unique ID, I can change LEDs just by calling out the ID of the chip and then sending the RGB values. This means that if the display gets larger, updating single LEDs will never get slower. OF course, updating the entire display will get slower as the display gets larger (this is always the case).

Finally, cost. A single ShiftBrite costs $5. This means that for my display of 100 RGB LEDs, using ShiftBrites would cost me $500. My components did not cost as much, not much less though, to be honest. The actual cost I will post on my blog sometime once I get all my bills together.

I am glad you are liking my LEDs, this post might have come across in the wrong way, like I am not liking ShiftBrites. WHile I have never used them, I can see how they would be fantastic to use when you need just a couple of RGB LEDs. I was merely comparing them to my solution, as you had asked :)

Regards

Thanks for your kind words. I have a huge update to post on my blog sebsz.com tomorrow, please check it tomorrow if you are interested. I have finished a small board with 25 RGB LEDs, I’m extremely happy with the result.