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Chicago Electronic Distributors has become part of the PiShop family. Please place orders through PiShop.us, as we are no longer taking orders through this site. More details are in our blog!
Chicago Electronic Distributors has become part of the PiShop family. Please place orders through PiShop.us, as we are no longer taking orders through this site. More details are in our blog!

What's better than a single LED? Lots of LEDs! A fun way to make a small linear display is to use two 12-bar Bi-color bar-graphs. Wouldn't it be awesome if you could control a colorful bargraph without tons of wiring? That's where this LED bar-graph backpack comes in. Much like Adafruit's 8x8 and 7-segment backpacks, this backpack pairs perfectly with our bar-graphs and manages all the LED control and multiplexing. 

The backpack uses a driver chip that does all the heavy lifting for you: It has a built in clock so it can multiplex the display. It uses constant-current drivers for ultra-bright, consistent color, 1/16 step display dimming, all via a simple I2C interface. The backpack comes with address-selection jumpers so you can connect up to eight of these bar-graphs on a single I2C bus. You can also mix-and-match the bar-graph breakout with our other types of I2C LED backpacks. 

The product kit comes with:

  • A fully tested and assembled LED backpack stick
  • Two 12-bar bi-color bar-graphs
  • 4-pin header

A bit of soldering is required to attach the matrix onto the backpack but its very easy to do and only takes about 5 minutes. 

Of course, in classic Adafruit fashion, they have a detailed tutorial showing you how to solder, wire and control the display. They even wrote a very nice library for the backpacks so you can get running in under half an hour, displaying images on the matrix or numbers on the 7-segment. If you've been eyeing matrix displays but hesitated because of the complexity, this is the solution you've been looking for! 

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