CharliePlex BLUE Led 8×16

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.

Works with any Raspberry Pi computer, including the original Pi 1, B+, Pi 2, Pi 3, Pi 4, and Pi Zero.