In this post I’ll show how to interface a Keyestudio 40 RGB LED 2812 Pixel Matrix Shield with Arduino UNO compatible board. Each LED on this shield has an integrated chip WS2812 and can be individually controlled. Attached Arduino code makes use of these features making the shield to behave like a simple 7-Segment counter showing 0-9 digits in continues loop with 1 sec delay between each count. In addition each segment has a different color that can be changed by modifying strip.setPixelColor () function. You’ll need to include Adafruit_NeoPixel.h library to be able to compile the code. For more details see design sketch here. No schematic diagram this time, just put the LED shield on top of the UNO board and your circuit is ready.
This design can be expanded by adding additional shields or just a 2812 LED strips like this one. Make sure that you connect the Data Out line of the last LED in the LED shield to Data In of the next array and update the total number of LEDs in the code.