The ShiftBrite is a module by macetech that integrates the Allegro A6281 3-channel constant current LED driver with a large, high-brightness RGB LED. Using just three digital output pins and a simple protocol, your microcontroller can control a long chain of ShiftBrites. Each ShiftBrite in the chain can be independently changed to any of the 1,073,741,824 possible colors to create dynamic displays and decorations. Adjustable current for each color channel lets you correct for slight differences in brightness. Overtemperature shutdown protects the LED driver from overheating. The pins of the ShiftBrite are spaced 0.1" apart, making them compatible with breadboards and perfboards.
The ShiftBrite comes with male header pins.
Since the ShiftBrite is controlled by Allegro's A6281 LED driver, careful reading of the A6281Ős datasheet (315k pdf) is recommended. Each ShiftBrite input is buffered and output on the corresponding output pin. This allows you to chain together ShiftBrites without increasing the number of IO pins dedicated to controlling the ShiftBrites. The picture below shows three ShiftBrites chained together.
Each ShiftBrite has a 32-bit shift register. When a rising edge is detected at the clock in pin (CI), the data in pin (DI) value is shifted onto the first bit of the shift register, and the last bit sets the value of the data out pin (DO). After you have loaded a 32-bit packet into the shift register of each ShiftBrite in the chain, bringing the latch in pin (LI) from low to high causes the data to take effect (changing the color or updating a configuration setting). LI must be brought low again before clocking in additional data.
To send data to the ShiftBrite, you need to use at least three digital I/O pins (four if you want to use the EI pin). The Orangutan robot controllers work well for this. Here is some sample code for setting the colors of a chain of ShiftBrites using bit banging on the AVR. The chain can be arbitrarily long, but the changing color pattern will repeat on every sixth module.
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A6281 Datasheet 