Details
Tentacle Breakouts help you wire up projects with strands of LEDs that dangle from a central ring (like tentacles) or hang from horizontal strips (like curtains). They can be used with Tentacle Buddies if you want to easily add USB power to your LEDs and controller, or they can be used to break out LEDs from an existing strand. The Tentacle System is optimized for a Pixelblaze Pico (though they can be used with any LED controller) and for Pebble-style strands with a Data Return line. They help keep your LED data wiring tidy and compact, and make connectorizing strands and controllers easy.
A full guide is in our Instructions.
Tentacle Breakout Boards
These are for daisy-chaining more dangling strands of LEDs! The input strand or wires come in from the left 3-pin connector, the data goes down to the tentacle which is another 4-pin interface with Data Return, and then it goes out the right 4-pin connector.
Note that the right is a 4-pin connector only to make it impossible to plug in connectorized strands going between Tentacle Breakouts upside-down/backwards, this ensures each will have a 4-pin end and a 3-pin end. The 4th pin is not used for anything which is why there is no wire to it on the pigtails.
There are a few options for these boards as well:
- Populated Rigid PCBs: These already have the connectors soldered and are perfect if you want to solder pigtails to your strips or strands and connectorize everything
- Rigid PCBs, Bare: Perfect if you have your own JST PH connectors, or want to solder LED strands directly to rigid boards.
- Flex PCBs, Bare: these are great for soldering Pebble strands directly to them, while maintaining the slimmest form factor possible and a little bit of flexibility for curved surfaces. Excellent for wearables or anything small. You can also cut these circuit boards with scissors if you just want to do a direct pass-through without the tentacle, making them a great way to connect Pebble strands together without splicing.
For LEDs, we're offering a little starter kit to get you going with Pebbles. It contains:
- 1m of 3-pin standard Pebble LEDs, 3cm spacing between LEDs
- 2m of 4-pin Pebble LEDs with Data Return line, 5cm spacing between LEDs