particular color but not any individual LED) is becoming easier to find

in the market but a RGB strip where you can actually control each LED

individually has only been the subject of geek fantasy. Every time I’ve

done something public with common RGB strip, someone has come up to me

and said “oh wow man, can you control those LED’s individually?”. No,

from? Well, the one I’ve been playing with fell into my lap a few

months ago — tossed there by my friend Dan who got it from a

shady-looking factory in China while there evaluating LED video wall

products. I’ve asked him for the name of the factory but he’s so far

consisted nothing more of RGB LED’s hooked up to standard standard

the strip like a common shift register but failed in confounding ways

to work. Eventually I had to cut away some of the silicone liner on the

strip to get a closer look at the driver chip. The chip turned out to

be a “HL1606″, nothing I’d ever heard of. A few hours of online

research left me with a datasheet for the HL1606 written only in

Chinese and a single posting by one “John Cohn” from September 2007

looking for anybody who had more information on how to drive the chip.

somewhat successful but left me scratching my head over the precise way

and latches valid, the corresponding LED driver output state for

Prescribed changes gradually, when the change to keep the brightest

the datasheet lasted for only so long before I got pulled away to more

important distractions and the RGB strip sat on my bench untouched for

bike wheels, a guy came by wearing a most eye-catching headband. The

headband was constructed out flexible circuit board material on which

RGB LEDs were mounted and were clearly being controlled individually.

Obviously, this was a guy I had to talk to. After a short conversation

I learned that he had found the strip from an electronics booth in

China, the strip was built using HL1606 driver chips, and he too had

had a heck of a time (and only partial success) figuring out how to

drive them. We exchanged contact info and a pledge to get in touch

after the faire to share data and geek out on the strips. It wasn’t

until after I had gotten home did I piece it together that this guy was

none other than the “John Cohn” whose lonely, unanswered call for help

in 2007 was the only evidence I was able to find that anybody else in

a copy of the datasheet in Chinese which I had already found earlier as

well as the PIC code for his headband. The PIC code was the missing key

to the puzzle and by studying it in conjunction with the

machine-translated datasheet I was finally able to get my head wrapped

and open sourced it. It’s still a bit unpolished and under-documented

but it’s feature-complete in the sense that it can control all of the

more of the strips but I’ve found them being sold online. So far I’ve

only been able to find them being bundled with a controller and I’d

like to find a source selling them without one (hopefully at a reduced

price). To hunt them down on your own, the keywords to look for are

HL1606 and 5-volt operation. The 5-volt operation is actually the key

distinguisher, as all of the non-addressable RGB strips run on 12V or

In it he documents more what you need to do to drive the chip and even

suggests some possible suppliers for the strips. Check it out (and if

you like it, give him a vote for the ‘Get the LED Out’ contest he’s