Supported Hardware

This page lists the hardware that is officially supported to use this plugin

LED Strips

The 4 types of LED strips that the plugin supports are:

• WS2811 (including B variants)

• WS2812 (including B variants)

• SK6812 RGB

• SK6812 RGBW

Please note as well that 'NeoPixels' are an Adafruit brand name, I find that they are much cheaper direct from China with just as good results, they are the same thing.

To get the most of your RGBW strips, you can enable 'Use dedicated white' in the strip settings after it is setup.

Power Supplies

There are no officially-supported models for power supplies, since they are all the same. However, please make sure you are using an external power supply and not using the RPi GPIO pins to power the LEDs. They cannot provide the power drawn by a strip of WS281x LEDs.

Don't use tiny wires to connect the LEDs - these can heat up and melt if they are too thin.

Level Shifting

I have had good results with a 74ACHT125 level shifter, which is recommended by Adafruit for their Neopixels. Please note that while WS281x LEDs work without level shifting, you may need to keep the wires as short as possible - especially when using 12V LEDs.

Raspberry Pi

All models of Raspberry Pi are supported currently, however for new models I will have to wait for upstream support from the rpi-ws281x library first. This page will be updated if this happens!

This also means that no other devices than a Raspberry Pi are supported. There are no alternative libraries for WS281x LED control (for Python) that could enable this, so there is nothing that can be done. Sorry!

The plugin will not load if it is not running on a Raspberry Pi, even if it does install.

Got the necessary hardware? Wire it up!