Adafruit CharliePlex LED Matrix Bonnet – 8×16 Green LEDs

You won’t be able to look away from the mesmerizing patterns created by this Adafruit CharliePlex LED Matrix Display Bonnet.  This 16×8 LED display can be placed atop any Raspberry Pi computer with a 2×20 connector for a beautiful, bright grid of 128 charlieplexed LEDs. It even comes with a built-in charlieplex driver that runs over I2C.

We carry these Bonnets in a few vivid colors – this is the green LED matrix.

What is particularly nice about this Wing is the I2C LED driver chip has the ability to PWM each individual LED in a 16×8 grid so you can have beautiful LED lighting effects without a lot of pin twiddling. Simply tell the chip which LED on the grid you want lit, and what brightness and it’s all taken care of for you. You get 8-bit (256 level) dimming for each individual LED.

The IS31FL3731 is a nice little chip – and it runs happily over 3.3V power. Inside is enough RAM for 8 separate frames of display memory, so you can set up multiple frames of an animation and flip them to be displayed with a single command. Since it uses I2C, it takes up only the SDA/SCL pins on your Pi and can share those pins with other I2C devices and sensors.

Comes fully assembled; no soldering required, so you can plug it in immediately. To program it, you’ll use our CircuitPython library, which works with Linux computers like Raspberry Pi. After a pip install, run some of the examples to display simple graphics or text.