Seeedstudio Issues
As of late I’ve been getting into bigger and bigger projects. Late last month I put in an order for a whole whack of parts from seeedstudio. The parts came in a week later and I tucked them away.
Last week my LED Driver ICs came in from Maxim, so today (now that PDEng is over with) I decided was a good time to start tinkering and working on a new project.
The main component of my order from seeedstudio was 50 RGB LEDs that I planned to interface with the LED Drivers. The LEDs I ordered were supposed to be common CATHODE, so I went about hooking all of them up on a breadboard to test them.
After 30 mins of tinkering I had nothing, not even a flicker. I kept looking over my wiring thinking I had messed up something obvious, but nothing came to the eye. When I used a normal red led to test, everything worked fine.
About an hour into the process, I was starting to give up, when I suddenly decided to just flip all the leads on the RGB Led around. Suprisingly it worked!
Now completely confused, I started going through my circuit again. Apparently, the LEDs I recieved were not common cathode, but common ANODE. To make matters worse, they didn’t even fit the datasheet shown on the website (also shown below):
RGB LED datasheet
Instead they followed this pattern:
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G B + R
This blows… common anode LEDs are useless to me for my application. To use my LED drivers I need common cathode LEDs
I just whipped out an email to seeedstudio, hopefully they’ll sort me out.