When you think of “programming lights,” what comes to mind? Perhaps you’ve attended the Pink Floyd Laser Spectacular, transporting you to the dark side of the moon. Maybe your neighbor down the street has a holiday light display that coordinates with festive music, causing bumper-to-bumper traffic on your cul-de-sac.
While those impeccably designed light shows are certainly examples of programmable lighting, customized LED RGB technology shows up in more places than you’d think. Lighting design shows up in a wide range of less obvious applications including smart residential lighting, automobiles, gaming, architectural, entertainment and digital signage. In this article, we’ll look at some of the key benefits of addressable RGB LEDs with built-in integrated circuits (ICs).
What Does ‘Addressable’ Mean?
Controllability is what separates addressable RGB LEDs from traditional ones. With addressable RGB LEDs, each one of the individual LED chips can be programmed independently. This enables users to have the flexibility and creativity to create infinite design patterns, precise customization, and synchronized lighting effects.
The versatility of addressable RGB LEDs allows for individual LEDs to showcase distinct colors, brightness levels, and effects, resulting in captivating and customizable lighting displays brimming with intricate patterns, smooth transitions, and intriguing sequences.
The Long and Short of Scalability
Addressable RGB LEDs are simply a more advanced version of traditional RGB LEDs. While traditional LEDs can only be set to display a single color across its LEDs, Addressable RGBs give the user greater control over individual LEDs, including color, brightness and pattern. These LEDs are perfect for showing animations and other dynamic displays or creating beautiful, complex lighting effects. Addressable LEDs also offer a high degree of flexibility and customization in lighting design compared to their non-addressable counterparts.
As traditional RGB LEDs typically can be connected in parallel with a constant current IC, addressable LEDs can be connected in series by connecting the “Data Out” of the previous LED to the Data In of the next in order to address all of them individually. A simple circuitry can be added so that if a LED is removed, the functionality of the rest of the chain is not affected.
The modularity of addressable RGB LED lights enables them to be shortened or lengthened to match specific demands. By doing so, you can customize the length of a light strip or module to suit your project requirements perfectly. Additionally, addressable RGB LED light strips are compatible with DMX or SPI controllers, permitting you to control large-scale installations with thousands of LEDs.
Adding a Nice Touch with Timing and Transitions
With addressable RGB LEDs, you can customize just about everything, including timing. You can change the timing of color changes, synchronize blinking or chasing, and create custom animations for a professional display.
Addressable RGB LEDs allow you to program carefully planned lighting sequences with precision timing. You can create a series of color changes or effects that occur in a specific order, synchronized with specific time intervals. This customization option is particularly useful for designing complex lighting shows or synchronized animations. As lighting can help to establish a certain ambiance or feeling, these features can add to positive experiences at venues like concerts, restaurants, museums, casinos and driving in electric vehicles.
Internal Chips: The Key to Unlocking Lighting Control
RGB LEDs rely on internal circuit chips (ICs) to allow for even more control options. ICs can manage individual LEDs on the strip, making it possible for users to create intricate lighting effects. ICs can generate a wide array of colors and shades, including adjustable brightness levels for each LED. This feature turns an LED strip into an unlimited color palette for lighting designers. The ability to change brightness levels allows for effects like color fading, chasing, strobing, and pulsing.
On top of color and brightness control, ICs help to extend the lifespan of RGB LEDs. To accomplish this, they regulate the power supply and minimize heat buildup while the LEDs are in use. This makes addressable RGB LEDs with ICs lower maintenance and more cost-effective in the long run.
Get Creative with American Bright
American Bright has designed a full line of smart RGB LEDS with ICs which are available in PLCC-6 5050, and PLCC-4 5050, 3528, 4020 (side-emitting), and EMC 2020 SMT and CSP packages. We can tackle any lighting challenge you have. Let us light the way to your next project! Consult with an American Bright technical advisor today.
