Today, we’re going to explore the uses of LED strip lighting—a
great, simple component that can add a lot of visual impact to
any project. LED’s provide bright, colorful and (in some cases)
customizable light, and by buying them in strip form you save
yourself a lot of time and effort at the soldering bench. These
LED strips are fun and glowy. There are 32 RGB LEDs per meter,
and you can control each LED individually! Yes, that’s right,
this is the digitally-addressable type of LED strip. You can set
the color of each LED’s red, green and blue component with 7-bit
PWM precision (so 21-bit color per pixel). The LEDs are
controlled by shift-registers that are chained up down the strip
so you can shorten or lengthen the strip. Only 2 digital output
pins are required to send data down. The PWM is built into each
chip so once you set the color you can stop talking to the strip
and it will continue to PWM all the LEDs for you.