Useful APA102 form factor
I just received my first order from Ray Wu. He is selling strings of APA102’s wired with flexible 4 wire connections 5cm long between individual leds. This makes the string highly conformable to 3D shapes, and allows variable spacing between leds if you can hide the wires. The leds are manufactured as break-away sticks of 10.
They are in strings of 100 for about $19 plus shipping. This string worked fine using the Adafruit Dotstar strandtest example.
Looks like this:
I looked at getting these for a project recently. How good are the solder joints and connection from the cables to each pixel? Are they sealed from accidental damage? What is the highest SPI frequency you can drive the 100 pixel string at?
The solder joints look good, quite uniform, edge of the insulation on each wire butted up to the edge of the chip. The pad spacing is very tight, so I would guess some kind of mechanized process. No sealing or protection whatsoever. I have no input on the speed question at the moment.
Thanks for sharing- as is it reminds me of a “tribal” necklace I had in the 90s. Might need to make a new one for the new millennium
