Come on down to Crazy Garrett's, the boss is away and the deals are government agents trying to control my mind! Ahem. Well, the deals are real enough...up to 60% off on some products.

The main reason for the sale is that we have some extra inventory of A6281-based products. Back when we started this business in 2008, there weren't many options for controllable RGB pixels...hard to believe today, but a $5 chainable RGB pixel with PWM was a pretty good deal back then. Times have changed, and the A6821 chip has been discontinued by Allegro. So we've decided to move this last batch of inventory out the door where it'll do some RGB blinky good rather than keeping our stock shelves from floating away.

In addition to the ShiftBrite and MegaBrite products, we're also discounting the OctoBrite DEFILIPPI even though the TLC5947 is still available. It's a good chip that can handle up to 30V strings of LEDs with 12bit PWM, but aside from special applications it seems that 5V and 8 bits are blinky enough. We're also discounting all of our 6-pin cables! These are made for ShiftBrites, but are just 6x1 0.1" female header cables...they are pretty useful for many tasks around the lab.

The ShiftBrite still has some unique advantages; it's a 10-bit PWM per channel rather than 8-bit, and it's all set up for mounting with two large mounting ears and holes for screws. The headers+cable connection is easily removed for no-solder replacement...maintenance seems to be rarely considered in most LED projects, but it's a fact that if you want to keep a project going, you'll have to replace a piece once in while.

Here are a few projects that used the ShiftBrite (all the hardware still works fine today):

Twitter Table (LED matrix coffee table):

ShiftBrite Election Meter:

Front fence Christmas display:

The MegaBrite is based on the same chip as the ShiftBrite, but still has some relevance in today's age of addressable pixels. The LEDs on the MegaBrite require 100mA rather than the standard 20mA, so they're 5 times as bright (the A6281 chip can handle up to 150mA). It's still a pretty neat way to get some RGB lighting into the right place. Here are a few of our favorite MegaBrite projects:

MegaBrite Christmas Tree (well, triangle):

New Year's Eve MegaBrite Ball:

The Mega Wall: