You won't be able to look away from the bewitching patterns created by this CharliePlex LED matrix display cap from Adafruit.  This 16x8 LED display can be placed on any Raspberry Pi with a 2x20 connector, for a beautiful light grid of 128 LEDs. It even comes with an integrated charlieplex driver that runs on I2C.

We offer these caps in a few bright colors - this is the blue LED matrix.

What is particularly beautiful about this cap is that the I2C LED driver chip has the ability to PWM each individual LED in a 16x8 grid so you can have beautiful LED lighting effects. Just tell the chip which LED on the grid you want to turn on, and what brightness and everything is supported for you. You get an 8-bit dimming (level 256) for each individual LED.

The IS31FL3731 is a pretty little chip - and fortunately it works with a 3.3V power supply. Inside, there is enough RAM for 8 separate images, display memory so that you can configure several images of an animation and flip them over so that they can be displayed with a single command. Since it uses I2C, it only uses the SDA/SCL pins of your Pi and can share these pins with other I2C devices and sensors.

Delivered fully assembled, no welding is necessary, so you can plug it in immediately. To program it, you will use our CircuitPython library, which works with Linux computers like Raspberry Pi. After installing a pip, run a few examples to display simple graphics or text.
 

Technical details

Product dimensions: 65.0mm x 30.0mm x 30.0mm x 6.8mm / 2.6" x 1.2" x 0.3".
Product weight: 8.2g / 0.3oz

Documentation

Adafruit_CircuitPython_IS31FL3731