Adafruit has designed a breakout board for ISSI’s IS31FL3731 I²C LED driver chip. The chip has the ability to PWM each individual LED in a 144-LED matrix, providing the ability to have beautiful LED lighting effects while reducing the required I/O pins. The driver allows each of the 144 LEDs to be set individually, and each LED can be dimmed individually with 8-bit, allowing 256 steps of linear dimming.

The IS31FL3731 can operate from 2.7 - 5.5 V power and logic, so it’s flexible for use with most microcontrollers and the address can be set easily using the onboard jumpers so that up to 4 matrices can share an I²C bus. The driver has enough RAM for eight separate frames of display memory, so multiple frames of an animation can be loaded and displayed with a single command. Additionally, the IS31FL3731 has the ability to modulate LED frames from a connected audio signal.

This chip is ideal for small LED displays, and Adafruit has designed the driver breakout to match up with their ready-to-go LED grids in red, yellow, green, blue, warm white, and cool white. Easily combine the driver breakout board with any of Adafruit’s recommended 9 x 16 LED matrix boards, or control any matrix meeting the specifications in the IS31FL3731 datasheet.

Please note this driver board does not come with any LEDs; recommended LED matrices are sold separately.