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As a programmer I am new and lack some knowledge in electronic and I will appreciate the help.

I wish to connect 3 Adafruit NeoPixel NeoMatrix 8x8 - 64 RGB LED Pixel Matrix (https://www.adafruit.com/products/1487) can some one please provide me a scheme how to connect/tile 3 these NeoMatrix 8x8 to one Arduino Uno.

Thanks a lot

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  • To add to both existing answers. Memory ends up being your problem because each pixel needs 3 bytes for it's color value. I would highly recommend that you read all of adafruits info for that product AND their uber guide, When you're finished you will understand (I did anyway). One more thing adafruit site has conflicting info, they DO now have libraries for this type of LED (WS2811/ws2812) for the rasperberry pi, the info in Russell McMahon's answer is out of date, but it's because so is adafruit's page--elsewhere adfruit does have libraries for the pi
    – Tyson
    Jan 30, 2015 at 16:29

3 Answers 3

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On the page that you cite they say

If, say, you need MORE blinky, you can chain these together.

  • For the second shield, connect the DIN connection to the first panel's DOUT.

  • Also connect a ground pin together

  • and power with 5V.

  • There you go!

You can chain as many as you'd like although after 4 or more panels you may run low on RAM if you're using an UNO. Watch your power usage too, you may need a 5V 10A power supply for so many of these!


Related:

They also say:

  • There is a single data line with a very timing-specific protocol. Since the protocol is very sensitive to timing, it requires a real-time microconroller such as an AVR, Arduino, PIC, mbed, etc. It cannot be used with a Linux-based microcomputer or interpreted microcontroller such as the netduino or Basic Stamp.

    Our wonderfully-written Neopixel library for Arduino supports these pixels! As it requires hand-tuned assembly it is only for AVR cores but others may have ported this chip driver code so please google around.

    An 8MHz or faster processor is required.

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  • Hi, Thanks. Could you please provide me a scheme of how to connect them. Feb 5, 2015 at 21:49
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On the products page, they link to the Neopixel Uberguide, which should really contain what you need :-)

The good thing about the NeoPixels is that they can be chained, since each pixel is supplied with VCC, GND, Data in and Data out. Data out of LED1 will be data in for LED2, and afaik you can make infinitely long chains this way

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I found the http://fastled.io/ libary to be a useful and well documented (https://github.com/FastLED/FastLED/wiki/Overview) alternative to Adafruit's NeoPixel library.

FastLED has some clever compression of palettes, and many other nice features that might save you valuable memory when using many neopixels.

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